No, you're not doing work. If you have had physics at some point, you will understand that work is a force applied through a distance (stay with me for a sec.). A good demonstration is you push a large rock across a field. Now, imagine that the rock doesn't move. At the end of the day, you may have pushed harder on that rock, and expended more energy, than if you'd pushed a different rock across a field. But, at the end of the day, your rock is still in the same spot, hence no "work" was done (though energy was expended).
If you conflate "work" with "productivity," you will understand my point of view that academic studies are not work. You are certainly expending energy, but unless you happen to be doing production research which is valuable to an end user to make money - you're not really being productive in society.
The challenge is that most people want a certain level of comfort and services: A nice house, healthcare, safe roads, education, entertainment. To get all those things, other people have to do work. And they trade that work through the medium of money. Ted Kaczynski (the unibomber) was a smart guy who lived on a few hundred dollars a year. He worked very little and pursued his own creativity.
Do I think there are problems with our IP laws? Sure. But that doesn't change the fundamental problem that to live comfortably, as most Americans define it, requires the active participation of lots of people to do things for you. And they want to live comfortably, too. TANSTAAFL.
No, he's partly right. There are lots of places to live where $10,000 a year is enough to survive. For someone in the creative class, with a solid foundation in a technical or artistic field which can be performed mostly via remote, can certainly make that kind of money in a 10 hour work week.
The problem is that most people don't want to live where $10,000 can be stretched for a year, nor do they want to live in a manner which requires they stretch $10,000 to last for a year. The problem is compounded in that if they are truly good enough, and have the business savvy, to "create" valuable intellectual goods to make $10,000 a year consistently, they're probably going to get more and more clients and find themselves with $100,000+ a year and a 60 hours workweek. Telling people you are too busy, or declining most work, takes you off the "active" list for most clients. Which makes it hard to sustain that continuous $10k.
Besides, living on $10k a year is a great idea when you're 25 and healthy. Living on $10k a year sucks if you find yourself with a medical condition and no health insurance (which can cost that $10k very easily). Again, if you're willing to live life simply, and die quickly, it's not a problem.
Yeah. See, the problem lies on both sides. People graduating from college are expecting to receive exceptional salaries for incomplete skills. Now that the workforce is mobile (you can, and probably will, change jobs every 3-5 years), it's hard for a business to justify paying $40-50,000 a year so that they can reduce the productivity of a truly worthwhile, $80,000-$100,000/yr senior person to train you for two years so that you can become useful.
At least in engineering, even the best schools are not preparing the average (or even above average) college grad for work in the industry. They're giving them basic knowledge. In a production environment (i.e. all non-governmental/non-academic), it takes between 1.5 and 3 years to get someone "trained" to be able to do a professional job with significant autonomy. That training is going mean that the new hire probably won't actually start making money for about 3-5 years. If they're going to leave in 3-5 years, that means a new-hire out of college is, at best, a break-even proposition for the business. As a businessman, I will tell you that break-even is not what we shoot for.
Not even close. A patent is, by definition, a monopoly on a specific technology which is granted by the government specifically for this purpose - to prevent unauthorized use and theft of intellectual property (well, really to advance the arts and sciences, but who are we fooling).
Patents are not like trademarks, which must be defended - they can be cherry picked. All that is necessary is to prove that someone used your technology without a license. It's like speeding (to bring this back to a car analogy) - it doesn't matter if everyone else on the road was doing 90 and passing you in a 65 zone, if the cop clocked you at 80, you're still violating the law, and he can pull you over - and you'll lose in court. This is kind of the situation - everybody is doing it, Apple just decided to flip the cop the bird as they went by.
No, Cain has bastardized a gross receipts tax into a tax dodge for businesses and the wealthy.
Taxing net income and payroll needs to be eliminated. By definition, both of those allow gaming of the system to carve out what isn't "income" or offsets to your "income."
Gross receipts shortcuts those end-runs: it doesn't matter what you spend your money on, or how you got your money. The government takes a percentage off the top, not off the bottom. And no sales tax. Why put that overhead on businesses? It's much easier to simply have the businesses bundle that tax into the price of the goods, because it's a GROSS point. Simple math.
People on the bottom of Hermain Cain's tax plan pay 18% of every dollar - they're double taxed. 9% off of what you earn, then 9% again when you spend it! If you're wealthy and make money off cap gains, you don't pay the first 9%. If you spend money on business stuff, you don't pay taxes on it, AND you aren't paying the 9% you're currently paying in payroll taxes. Of course businesses like it. And the idiots who can't do 9% of a number in their head are going to get screwed...which is most of the population.
All the big unknowns appear to have shifted from physical to intellectual projects, like Finance. Credit default swaps were amazingly new, and amazingly risky on the down side, but we built that manned rocket to Jupiter and then watched it explode before our eyes as it tried to pick up too much speed around Mars and went careening into the planet, packed from stern to stem with all of our retirement money.
And who would have thought that spending money on all sorts of interesting things, and deciding that nobody had to pay for it because we could borrow the money for just a couple cents on the dollar (and the people who could pay for it found ways not to pay), would end in tears. And yet, here we are in the US, desperately trying to figure out how to lock in that pennies rate to long term debt, 'cause if we see bond rates like we did under Reagan we're going to look like the dumb, ugly sibling compared to Greece.
If you think big risks aren't being taken, you're wrong - they're just in different places.
Yes, but as the grid gets cleaner, so do the EVs - right up to fully renewable power. Gasoline cars will never improve beyond the limit of the liquid petroleum that they carry.
(I know of a similar situation in a company, but it occurred before I arrived. Everyone would check their emails first thing, because the IT staff would freeze the accounts the night before. They said it was really, really bad. I stayed 2 years and the company was okay, but I didn't really enjoy the science behind what we did.)
Which is amazingly annoying because those of us who just want Google to keep up the spam filters and ward off being blacklisted have Apps accounts for our personal domains. Google is so finicky about switching stuff later that I'm afraid to use/make an alternate vanilla gmail account and then find out in a year that I can't migrate it back to my "real" email when they activate Apps accounts on G+.
In engineering, if you really screw up you lose your ability (license) to do that job so you can't screw up again. That hangs over every PE that does work, and we all think about it when we decide if we're going to double check the numbers or just kick it out the door and cross our fingers.
Industry got a pass written for them by congress which exempts them from professional engineering laws because they didn't want to have to deal with it. It comes down to there being one ass to kick - they person who's seal is on the final design, whether it's software, a building, a car, or a chainsaw. For three of the four of those, there is nobody there who will take the brunt of a massive failure - and thus nobody who feels compelled to make sure it's absolutely right before it goes out the door.
Houses don't require PEs, unless they're in very, very dangerous environments. And in most places (i.e. anywhere that uses the International Building Code), you can design small commercial facilities and any size agricultural building with no more license than a pencil and a piece of paper.
More to the point, app developers pay 30% on their GROSS RECEIPTS. If the US switched to a gross receipts tax rather than an income (personal) or profit (corporate) tax, many of the loopholes and dodges would disappear entirely and a flat rate would likely be in the single-digit percentages.
You're paying mostly for lower production runs and marketing. Most of the technology in "high end" autos is inferior to your typical Toyota Camry. What you are getting is, hopefully, parts that are a bit more durable under higher load cycling. Thing is, it costs more to engineer out material than it does to leave it in and have a stouter part. But $800 in material per auto amortized over a 500,000 car run easily pays for a few engineers to run those numbers. Have you seen how a Bugatti is put together? It's breathtakingly inefficient and simple.
The higher end cars are higher margin, but due to the lower volume there really is a higher base cost they're starting from. Add that to the desire to make the brand exclusive and you get higher prices. Do you really think a Patek Phillipe keeps significantly better time than a Timex - or has more technology involved than a watch with a bluetooth readout or a link to the GPS timecode? Of course not.
This is an interesting point, actually. If my truck is parked on the lot of the local Ace Hardware store, and it goes bankrupt, can the bankruptcy court sell off my truck to settle Ace's debts? What if Ace had a stock of widgets that they were selling on consignment for me? What if I delivered widgets for them to sell, but have not been paid for them?
I believe the first two the ownership reverts to me, but in the third case I may be SOL. IP has weird twists that make it hard to conflate with physical goods, too. I agree that legislation is the most likely solution. If these were medical records, there wouldn't be an issue.
You don't understand what a Ponzi scheme is. Stop listening to politicians when learning the definition of words.
"A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation."
Note that there are no investors here. There are business owners who are committing fraud at the expense of their clients.
You would need the DX version of a Kindle, so more like a 12-14 month payback - but your point, as with the others here, is well taken that as a paper substitute you may as well get a Kindle. It doesn't have a touchscreen interface, but the current iPads have such poor precision in note taking that it is nearly useless*. Of course, if they want it for other things, or require color, then it's reasonable to expect the more general tablet.
*I have an ipad, and I would use it for markup, but the PDF interface is very, very limited (that's an iOS failing, btw) when it works, and you may as well be drawing with a crayon or wide sharpie.
Have you ever tried getting files onto the iPad in a useful, orderly way. I have thousands of documents which are synced with a land and cloud server. Often, it's faster to walk to my desk, navigate to the file, and print it out than it is to find it on the iPad.
Also, until they get a real stylus interface (and not the ones with the 5mm tip; 0.5mm would be more appropriate) you will never be able to make decent notes in the margins.
This is a cute student project, but most would be considered "seasonal" shelter in even basic developed countries. I applaud the creativity, especially of the pinwheel house. Other houses sounded a bit more like a scavenger hunt that could have been done by any 5th year studio student in US architectural schools.
I would certainly hope that, given an entire year of studio work, there is more to the final product than the marketing brochure that came out of the pinwheel house. Part of the practice of architecture (which these students, we presume, would like to eventually be) is making buildings which are buildable. That means detailed drawings of each part which is not OTS hardware - but I see nothing. Does the robotics team get to draw a picture of a walking robot, or do they have to actually do piece drawings and wiring diagrams to actually build the robot?
To be fair, with skilled assembly, it is certainly better than most slum housing - but without skilled labor it may not be much better. None of the designs, save possibly the concrete roof, could be considered water tight for any length of time as initially reviewed, and few appear to have any chance of surviving a 50 year environmental event, much less protecting the occupants. I guess if they're cheap to build (just 6 years of the average 3rd world persons salary, by the website's count), you could see them as disposable and just build them again after each typhoon or earthquake.
From one of the linked sites:
"MIT 1K House is partnering with Skanska and Next Phase Studios to construct three exhibit 1K House prototypes in on MIT campus in Cambridge, MA. The project is moving forward, and the goal is to construct the prototypes by MIT Commencement on June 4, 2010. "
What I want to know it - if Skanska supposedly built 3 of these prototypes on the MIT campus in 2010, how much did it cost? I didn't see pictures, so I presume that the Skanska bid came in somewhere north of $3000 (or even the $6000 estimate for Philippines construction). IT doesn't appear that any of these houses has actually ever been built.
It's the end connections I presumed were expensive, and an area where their patent portfolio was thin. I can agree somewhat on the cable front, and I want thinking about TOSLINK when I thought of cheap cables, but I'd never really considered what the bandwidth was.
Careful...there are things you can do with concrete which - while quite a bit outside the mainstream of construction - have been used. Naturally, I didn't RTFA, but if the printer can supply an internal web of properly place, ductile material and the concrete can be formed in a continuous process which allows the hydration to occur across the layer interface you could conceivably create some interesting results. It's a long, long way from the 400-800yd cost of concrete today (that's formed, placed, reinforced, and finished, not just the $90-120/yd for the mix), but there are things you could do that would be quite interesting architecturally.
I read that as "we don't own all the patents on the interconnect hardware, and to produce it would cost us more than using our in-house patent base and patent-free copper connections. Surprisingly, it turns out we're somewhat incompetent at modeling electrical connections and the results don't match our simulations but they're better than we planned, so we'll patent what we have and plan on taking that to the bank."
Slashdot Mirror
No, you're not doing work. If you have had physics at some point, you will understand that work is a force applied through a distance (stay with me for a sec.). A good demonstration is you push a large rock across a field. Now, imagine that the rock doesn't move. At the end of the day, you may have pushed harder on that rock, and expended more energy, than if you'd pushed a different rock across a field. But, at the end of the day, your rock is still in the same spot, hence no "work" was done (though energy was expended).
If you conflate "work" with "productivity," you will understand my point of view that academic studies are not work. You are certainly expending energy, but unless you happen to be doing production research which is valuable to an end user to make money - you're not really being productive in society.
The challenge is that most people want a certain level of comfort and services: A nice house, healthcare, safe roads, education, entertainment. To get all those things, other people have to do work. And they trade that work through the medium of money. Ted Kaczynski (the unibomber) was a smart guy who lived on a few hundred dollars a year. He worked very little and pursued his own creativity.
Do I think there are problems with our IP laws? Sure. But that doesn't change the fundamental problem that to live comfortably, as most Americans define it, requires the active participation of lots of people to do things for you. And they want to live comfortably, too. TANSTAAFL.
No, he's partly right. There are lots of places to live where $10,000 a year is enough to survive. For someone in the creative class, with a solid foundation in a technical or artistic field which can be performed mostly via remote, can certainly make that kind of money in a 10 hour work week.
The problem is that most people don't want to live where $10,000 can be stretched for a year, nor do they want to live in a manner which requires they stretch $10,000 to last for a year. The problem is compounded in that if they are truly good enough, and have the business savvy, to "create" valuable intellectual goods to make $10,000 a year consistently, they're probably going to get more and more clients and find themselves with $100,000+ a year and a 60 hours workweek. Telling people you are too busy, or declining most work, takes you off the "active" list for most clients. Which makes it hard to sustain that continuous $10k.
Besides, living on $10k a year is a great idea when you're 25 and healthy. Living on $10k a year sucks if you find yourself with a medical condition and no health insurance (which can cost that $10k very easily). Again, if you're willing to live life simply, and die quickly, it's not a problem.
Yeah. See, the problem lies on both sides. People graduating from college are expecting to receive exceptional salaries for incomplete skills. Now that the workforce is mobile (you can, and probably will, change jobs every 3-5 years), it's hard for a business to justify paying $40-50,000 a year so that they can reduce the productivity of a truly worthwhile, $80,000-$100,000/yr senior person to train you for two years so that you can become useful.
At least in engineering, even the best schools are not preparing the average (or even above average) college grad for work in the industry. They're giving them basic knowledge. In a production environment (i.e. all non-governmental/non-academic), it takes between 1.5 and 3 years to get someone "trained" to be able to do a professional job with significant autonomy. That training is going mean that the new hire probably won't actually start making money for about 3-5 years. If they're going to leave in 3-5 years, that means a new-hire out of college is, at best, a break-even proposition for the business. As a businessman, I will tell you that break-even is not what we shoot for.
Depends. Do you want Apple to sell stuff that's technically cool and utterly unhip?
Not even close. A patent is, by definition, a monopoly on a specific technology which is granted by the government specifically for this purpose - to prevent unauthorized use and theft of intellectual property (well, really to advance the arts and sciences, but who are we fooling).
Patents are not like trademarks, which must be defended - they can be cherry picked. All that is necessary is to prove that someone used your technology without a license. It's like speeding (to bring this back to a car analogy) - it doesn't matter if everyone else on the road was doing 90 and passing you in a 65 zone, if the cop clocked you at 80, you're still violating the law, and he can pull you over - and you'll lose in court. This is kind of the situation - everybody is doing it, Apple just decided to flip the cop the bird as they went by.
No, Cain has bastardized a gross receipts tax into a tax dodge for businesses and the wealthy.
Taxing net income and payroll needs to be eliminated. By definition, both of those allow gaming of the system to carve out what isn't "income" or offsets to your "income."
Gross receipts shortcuts those end-runs: it doesn't matter what you spend your money on, or how you got your money. The government takes a percentage off the top, not off the bottom. And no sales tax. Why put that overhead on businesses? It's much easier to simply have the businesses bundle that tax into the price of the goods, because it's a GROSS point. Simple math.
People on the bottom of Hermain Cain's tax plan pay 18% of every dollar - they're double taxed. 9% off of what you earn, then 9% again when you spend it! If you're wealthy and make money off cap gains, you don't pay the first 9%. If you spend money on business stuff, you don't pay taxes on it, AND you aren't paying the 9% you're currently paying in payroll taxes. Of course businesses like it. And the idiots who can't do 9% of a number in their head are going to get screwed...which is most of the population.
All the big unknowns appear to have shifted from physical to intellectual projects, like Finance. Credit default swaps were amazingly new, and amazingly risky on the down side, but we built that manned rocket to Jupiter and then watched it explode before our eyes as it tried to pick up too much speed around Mars and went careening into the planet, packed from stern to stem with all of our retirement money.
And who would have thought that spending money on all sorts of interesting things, and deciding that nobody had to pay for it because we could borrow the money for just a couple cents on the dollar (and the people who could pay for it found ways not to pay), would end in tears. And yet, here we are in the US, desperately trying to figure out how to lock in that pennies rate to long term debt, 'cause if we see bond rates like we did under Reagan we're going to look like the dumb, ugly sibling compared to Greece.
If you think big risks aren't being taken, you're wrong - they're just in different places.
Yes, but as the grid gets cleaner, so do the EVs - right up to fully renewable power. Gasoline cars will never improve beyond the limit of the liquid petroleum that they carry.
"In it's weight class" is the qualifier here.
Drip...drip...drip...
(I know of a similar situation in a company, but it occurred before I arrived. Everyone would check their emails first thing, because the IT staff would freeze the accounts the night before. They said it was really, really bad. I stayed 2 years and the company was okay, but I didn't really enjoy the science behind what we did.)
Even better:who will kill him, where he will be killed, and with what deadly instrument.
You know...I'll be this would make a really cool board game; I wonder if Hasbro wants to do a prequel? ;-)
Which is amazingly annoying because those of us who just want Google to keep up the spam filters and ward off being blacklisted have Apps accounts for our personal domains. Google is so finicky about switching stuff later that I'm afraid to use/make an alternate vanilla gmail account and then find out in a year that I can't migrate it back to my "real" email when they activate Apps accounts on G+.
In engineering, if you really screw up you lose your ability (license) to do that job so you can't screw up again. That hangs over every PE that does work, and we all think about it when we decide if we're going to double check the numbers or just kick it out the door and cross our fingers.
Industry got a pass written for them by congress which exempts them from professional engineering laws because they didn't want to have to deal with it. It comes down to there being one ass to kick - they person who's seal is on the final design, whether it's software, a building, a car, or a chainsaw. For three of the four of those, there is nobody there who will take the brunt of a massive failure - and thus nobody who feels compelled to make sure it's absolutely right before it goes out the door.
Houses don't require PEs, unless they're in very, very dangerous environments. And in most places (i.e. anywhere that uses the International Building Code), you can design small commercial facilities and any size agricultural building with no more license than a pencil and a piece of paper.
More to the point, app developers pay 30% on their GROSS RECEIPTS. If the US switched to a gross receipts tax rather than an income (personal) or profit (corporate) tax, many of the loopholes and dodges would disappear entirely and a flat rate would likely be in the single-digit percentages.
You're paying mostly for lower production runs and marketing. Most of the technology in "high end" autos is inferior to your typical Toyota Camry. What you are getting is, hopefully, parts that are a bit more durable under higher load cycling. Thing is, it costs more to engineer out material than it does to leave it in and have a stouter part. But $800 in material per auto amortized over a 500,000 car run easily pays for a few engineers to run those numbers. Have you seen how a Bugatti is put together? It's breathtakingly inefficient and simple.
The higher end cars are higher margin, but due to the lower volume there really is a higher base cost they're starting from. Add that to the desire to make the brand exclusive and you get higher prices. Do you really think a Patek Phillipe keeps significantly better time than a Timex - or has more technology involved than a watch with a bluetooth readout or a link to the GPS timecode? Of course not.
This is an interesting point, actually. If my truck is parked on the lot of the local Ace Hardware store, and it goes bankrupt, can the bankruptcy court sell off my truck to settle Ace's debts? What if Ace had a stock of widgets that they were selling on consignment for me? What if I delivered widgets for them to sell, but have not been paid for them?
I believe the first two the ownership reverts to me, but in the third case I may be SOL. IP has weird twists that make it hard to conflate with physical goods, too. I agree that legislation is the most likely solution. If these were medical records, there wouldn't be an issue.
You don't understand what a Ponzi scheme is. Stop listening to politicians when learning the definition of words.
"A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation."
Note that there are no investors here. There are business owners who are committing fraud at the expense of their clients.
You would need the DX version of a Kindle, so more like a 12-14 month payback - but your point, as with the others here, is well taken that as a paper substitute you may as well get a Kindle. It doesn't have a touchscreen interface, but the current iPads have such poor precision in note taking that it is nearly useless*. Of course, if they want it for other things, or require color, then it's reasonable to expect the more general tablet.
*I have an ipad, and I would use it for markup, but the PDF interface is very, very limited (that's an iOS failing, btw) when it works, and you may as well be drawing with a crayon or wide sharpie.
Now, if only they weren't discontinued. Oh, right - then they'd be the same price as an iPad.
Have you ever tried getting files onto the iPad in a useful, orderly way. I have thousands of documents which are synced with a land and cloud server. Often, it's faster to walk to my desk, navigate to the file, and print it out than it is to find it on the iPad.
Also, until they get a real stylus interface (and not the ones with the 5mm tip; 0.5mm would be more appropriate) you will never be able to make decent notes in the margins.
This is a cute student project, but most would be considered "seasonal" shelter in even basic developed countries. I applaud the creativity, especially of the pinwheel house. Other houses sounded a bit more like a scavenger hunt that could have been done by any 5th year studio student in US architectural schools.
I would certainly hope that, given an entire year of studio work, there is more to the final product than the marketing brochure that came out of the pinwheel house. Part of the practice of architecture (which these students, we presume, would like to eventually be) is making buildings which are buildable. That means detailed drawings of each part which is not OTS hardware - but I see nothing. Does the robotics team get to draw a picture of a walking robot, or do they have to actually do piece drawings and wiring diagrams to actually build the robot?
To be fair, with skilled assembly, it is certainly better than most slum housing - but without skilled labor it may not be much better. None of the designs, save possibly the concrete roof, could be considered water tight for any length of time as initially reviewed, and few appear to have any chance of surviving a 50 year environmental event, much less protecting the occupants. I guess if they're cheap to build (just 6 years of the average 3rd world persons salary, by the website's count), you could see them as disposable and just build them again after each typhoon or earthquake.
From one of the linked sites:
"MIT 1K House is partnering with Skanska and Next Phase Studios to construct three exhibit 1K House prototypes in on MIT campus in Cambridge, MA. The project is moving forward, and the goal is to construct the prototypes by MIT Commencement on June 4, 2010. "
What I want to know it - if Skanska supposedly built 3 of these prototypes on the MIT campus in 2010, how much did it cost? I didn't see pictures, so I presume that the Skanska bid came in somewhere north of $3000 (or even the $6000 estimate for Philippines construction). IT doesn't appear that any of these houses has actually ever been built.
But you'd probably put your cat down if it had a disease that would cost $100,000 to remedy.
It's the end connections I presumed were expensive, and an area where their patent portfolio was thin. I can agree somewhat on the cable front, and I want thinking about TOSLINK when I thought of cheap cables, but I'd never really considered what the bandwidth was.
Careful...there are things you can do with concrete which - while quite a bit outside the mainstream of construction - have been used. Naturally, I didn't RTFA, but if the printer can supply an internal web of properly place, ductile material and the concrete can be formed in a continuous process which allows the hydration to occur across the layer interface you could conceivably create some interesting results. It's a long, long way from the 400-800yd cost of concrete today (that's formed, placed, reinforced, and finished, not just the $90-120/yd for the mix), but there are things you could do that would be quite interesting architecturally.
I read that as "we don't own all the patents on the interconnect hardware, and to produce it would cost us more than using our in-house patent base and patent-free copper connections. Surprisingly, it turns out we're somewhat incompetent at modeling electrical connections and the results don't match our simulations but they're better than we planned, so we'll patent what we have and plan on taking that to the bank."