IBM's doing pretty good these days, but back in the 90s their future looked very uncertain. They were very strong in the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s, but they made some really bad decisions, and ended up downsizing the company greatly. They managed to avoid collapse, and have built themselves up a lot in the last decade. But they easily could have failed, ending up like Kodak instead.
It's worse than that. They'd keep it top-secret, figure out how to weaponize it, and it'd be decades before anyone was allowed to find any peaceful applications for it.
The best and brightest can go somewhere else, such as Switzerland where this great work is being done. Why stick around in a country where your work isn't appreciated?
People get the government they deserve; they're not being punished by any outside force, if they really wanted the SSC they could have pushed their politicians to push for it, but obviously it wasn't an important item for the voters, so they didn't get it.
You talk like people are being "punished" by some outside force when their own leaders make poor decisions and screw them over. Sorry, but the people are responsible for themselves. Those "vocal nutjobs in a position of power" were elected by the people, it's not like they took those positions by force, so obviously those "nutjobs" are reflecting the true attitudes of a majority of the population. The people of Texas have no one to blame but themselves.
I don't really agree with this. As I said in another post here, I don't understand why these scientists are still in Texas. They're not prevented from doing science by the US government (and its lack of funding); nothing is stopping them from applying for a job at CERN in Switzerland where all this great work is going on. So in fact, maybe merit really is a factor here, because if they're being turned down for these jobs, that shows they probably aren't as good as the people who do get to work there.
It does? How does the US lead, when the LHC is in Switzerland? Looks to me like Europe is leading in the area of high-energy physics, not the US.
What I don't understand is why these Texas scientists are upset, and why they're still in Texas. If all the work is in Europe, why wouldn't they just move there? That's the way it is when you're a professional; you only have a limited amount of choice in where you get to live, because you have to move to where the work is for your chosen industry. For instance, if you're a petroleum engineer, you're probably not going to get to live in Hawaii, since there's no oil there (that I'm aware of off the top of my head). If you're a VLSI designer, you're not going to get to work in Maine, since there's no companies there doing that work. High-energy physics doesn't seem like a career with tons of places to work.
It's not the only political thing with a terrible name in this country; remember the "Information Superhighway" (which everyone else called the "internet") term that politicians were throwing around for a while?
I completely disagree. Ballmer needs to stay right where he is. He's doing a great job... of running the company straight into the ground, and I couldn't be happier about it. I look forward to the day when MS collapses and goes the way of Borders books, Circuit City, and soon Best Buy. I really hope the MS shareholders don't make any changes in leadership there before it's too late.
Arizona gets a lot of shit too, but the power grid here is even more reliable, since the only "storms" we get are dust storms and rare thunderstorms with high winds. We never get ice storms, hurricanes, tornadoes (except for "dust devils" that you can walk through if you want), etc.
Most of the heaviest things (motors, airco) in homes still run on 110V even though 220V has been available in most homes but most homes haven't been wired correctly for 220V
No, they don't. HVAC, ranges, ovens, clothes dryers, hot water heating tanks (if electric), are always 220V in American homes. Every house in America is wired with 220V, and pretty much always has been. The 110V is derived from the 220V (line-to-line) by splitting it with a neutral in the electric panel.
It hasn't changed much if any. You generally have to get a cab to go from a NYC-area airport to anywhere, and it's expensive as hell and feels like you might not survive (probably like taking a cab in Turkey). There's some pretty good public transit right (if a bit old) in Manhattan, one of the five "boroughs" or districts of NYC, but outside of that, it sucks.
The wires you saw were probably DSL or cable (TV/internet) wires retrofitted onto the older buildings. When stuff like that is installed in an older building in this country (where "older" means any age, just that those wires weren't installed during construction, whether it was 100 years ago or 2), installers do the fastest, cheapest job they can, so if that means drilling a big hole in the side of the building and stringing wires haphazardly, that's what they do. It's not just NYC, they do it in suburban houses across the country too.
However, there's an important reason things are done this way here. Our corporate executives get bigger compensation packages and golden parachutes than anyone else in the world.
That doesn't make sense, why would anyone keep staff who work maybe only 3 weeks a year? If anything, there should be contractors who can soak up random spikes in demand.
OK, and what exactly are these contractors going to do for the rest of the year, sit on their asses and wait for a call?
Some forward thinking people set aside money to fix the things they build.
It's not really idiocy driving these actions I think, it's pure greed. It's not that the people running these companies are too stupid to plan ahead, they simply realize that doing so costs more money in the short term, so they don't bother, so they can get bigger bonuses. They don't care about the long term costs, because they're going to collect their bonuses and golden parachutes and leave the later problems for their successors to deal with.
Having the companies run directly by the government I don't think is likely to make things much better, at least not with the way the public currently votes. Just look at the USPS; it actually seems to be being run OK, given what they have to work with, but Congress is busy trying to destroy it with a 2006 law pushed by lobbyists that requires the USPS to pre-fund the retirement pensions of all the employees, something no private company has to do, and which is bankrupting the USPS. When the government is trying to destroy government-run companies for political purposes, having the company be government-run isn't going to help. The whole country's culture is broken. It's just like Mexico.
Look at any after the fact analysis of any disaster and you will see that the regulators are the bitches of the industry. Enron, Deep Water Horizon, Halliburton, Exxon, or a coal disaster.
Yep, there's a term for that, I think it's "regulatory capture"; basically, the regulators are cronies of the industries, as the mentality is that you need an industry insider to understand how to regulate that industry, but obviously what happens is the regulator's good buddies with the people in the industry so he doesn't bother to do much regulating. Just another feature of Crony Capitalism.
This is a good point. Tons of people are crying now because their A/C doesn't work and it's hot, but the power demands for whole-house A/C are huge, whereas a small room air conditioner uses much less power.
That's not *so* bad; for one thing, most mobile-specific sites I've seen have a selection somewhere to "view full site". But anyway, at least these companies' web designers have recognized that users of mobile devices might do better with a website tailored to their small-screen device, while still leaving the normal site as-is for desktop users. If the UI "experts" from Gnome or Microsoft, for instance, were in charge, these companies would all simply dump their regular sites, and only allow users to use the touch-friendly mobile versions, even if they're using a desktop with a 30" monitor.
I seriously doubt that. Maybe the incidence is higher in certain countries where the social environment is very bad, such as Somalia and the USA, but not everywhere.
Exactly, agreed 100%. There's a lot of problems with the AC's position, both practical and moral. People have a biological imperative to raise their own kids; telling them to not bother and to raise someone else's instead isn't going to sit well with the richer people. Telling the poor people they're not going to be allowed to keep their kids, and that their natural children will be forcibly removed from their custody at gunpoint isn't going to sit well with the poor people or with most others. How much of the voting public do you really think will be onboard with the idea of using poor people as breeding stock, for various reasons? Plus, what do you do with all the kids who have problems? It's not generally rich people who produce crack babies, kids with fetal alcohol syndrome, etc. There's a reason richer people who use surrogates have strict contracts about how the birth mother must take care of herself during gestation; having a child gestate in a mother that's malnourished (or eating the shit that passes for food in the USA these days), or who smokes or drinks or uses drugs, results in a child with developmental problems. Having poor people be used as baby factories is about the dumbest idea I've seen someone support here in a long time.
Possibly true; however it's more environmentally unfriendly for those who have kids that will continue to act socially irresponsibly. If the kids are raised with environmental awareness as an important factor, there'll probably be a net benefit for the environment overall. If we only allow the irresponsible and dumb to breed, the environment will suffer far worse.
Not necessarily. Sure, in the short term the environment will suffer more, but if we only allow the dumb to breed, then before too long society will simply collapse, as there's no was that a population of morons and irresponsible people can continue the way industrialized societies are going now; it simply requires too much skill and expertise by many different people to keep it going, and if too many things start failing then you're looking at food riots and total collapse and a big die-off of population, sorta like what happened on Rapa Nui but on a much larger scale.
That really depends on the animal and the child. What if your kid is a sociopath? I knew an older lady like this; her (grown, 20s) son was obviously a sociopath and even tried to convince her to sign all her property into his name, so he could kick her out and sell her house. She finally cut off all contact with him. I wonder if some people have multiple kids for this or a similar reason: if one dies early or turns out to be a shitball, at least you have one or two other chances of having a kid you're proud of and who returns your love.
At least with dogs and cats, if they're not working out in your home environment, you can give them away to someone else or take them back to the (hopefully no-kill) shelter.
And the bad part about all this is that, in today's society, unless you come from a very wealthy family that will bankroll you while you're young so you can raise their grandchildren, you need to spend your younger years in college and working on your career so you can have financial stability to raise a family without going broke. I grew up in a household that didn't have that stability, and it wasn't fun worrying about money all the time when I was 10 or so.
It's even worse for women since their best childbearing years are in their 20s, which is precisely the time it's absolutely the worst for them to have a kid financially, and by the time they're 40, they're frequently unable to do so. Worse yet is that having a child usually has an extremely negative effect on their career, unless they've established themselves well (which again, by this time they're now not very fertile).
I will say, however, that I'm almost 40 myself and I don't feel like I'm any less energetic than I was at 25.
As for adoption, there again you need financial stability, and unlike having your own kids, you really do *need* it. You can be poor and have your own kids, though it's a crappy life for the kids; but if you're poor, they won't allow you to adopt. Plus, adoption is difficult; people say there's all these extra kids out there, but there's a reason Americans frequently travel to Asia or Eastern Europe to adopt: there are very few healthy ones available. Almost no one wants to adopt a special-needs child (and for good reason, as you say, it's a huge amount of work to raise normal kids, but at least there the work steadily decreases after they're a couple years old and can do more and more things for themselves; with special-needs kids you're stuck doing everything for them for their whole lives, to varying degrees).
As an engineer, I can only see a couple of solutions to this growing problem in society: 1) change society so that people have kids in their 20s while everyone else bankrolls them, and then start on their careers in their 30s; this isn't likely to happen since we already hate giving people welfare to sit around and not work; 2) change society so that most women have kids at 20 and immediately give them to older couples to adopt; this isn't likely to work or be good for the kids, since biologically and sociologically it seems kids are better off raised by their own parents, particularly their own mother; 3) go back to the "village raises a child" society; not likely to happen since a greater population generally requires greater urbanization and less tribalism; and finally 4) re-engineer human biology so that we can have kids at 50 or 60 and still be young enough to raise them and enjoy the experience; this will require greatly increasing the human lifespan, so basically we need to put our hope (and funding) in Aubrey de Grey and his anti-senescence work.
My last D-Link router (DI-624) wouldn't allow me to print from a wireless device to my ethernet-connected HP printer after I upgraded the firmware (downgrading to the old version worked), and they ignored my complaints about the bug and never fixed it. Sorry, I can't buy a D-Link after that experience.
This sounds like BS to me. Burns, sure. 3rd-degree burns, however, mean that the skin is charred; most people never experience this, and only at the worst experience 2nd-degree burns, where you have redness and blistering. 2nd degree burns are extremely painful, worse than 1st degree (which is sunburn, scalds, etc.). 3rd degree burns, OTOH, are not painful at all, because the nerves have burned away and you can't feel anything.
The idea that someone would sit still and allow their skin to be burnt to char seems ridiculous to me; you have to first progress through the 1st and 2nd degree stages which are extremely painful themselves, and then in the 3rd degree stage you'll smell the unmistakable stench of burning flesh (there's nothing that smells like it, once you've smelled it once, you'll remember it forever).
It likely will, but for most users only for brief durations and infrequently. However, people do run their battery down from time to time, and then plug it in and start doing something computationally intensive, so the power supply has to be able to handle that.
Re:Eucalyptus trees are a bio terror weapon
on
Insects As Weapons
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· Score: 1
I guess you've never tried to get green wood to burn. It can be done, but it's not easy.
I'm sure that's true, but it's cold comfort to someone stuck in a company that really is so retarded they won't use it no matter what even the boss says.
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IBM's doing pretty good these days, but back in the 90s their future looked very uncertain. They were very strong in the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s, but they made some really bad decisions, and ended up downsizing the company greatly. They managed to avoid collapse, and have built themselves up a lot in the last decade. But they easily could have failed, ending up like Kodak instead.
It's worse than that. They'd keep it top-secret, figure out how to weaponize it, and it'd be decades before anyone was allowed to find any peaceful applications for it.
The best and brightest can go somewhere else, such as Switzerland where this great work is being done. Why stick around in a country where your work isn't appreciated?
People get the government they deserve; they're not being punished by any outside force, if they really wanted the SSC they could have pushed their politicians to push for it, but obviously it wasn't an important item for the voters, so they didn't get it.
You talk like people are being "punished" by some outside force when their own leaders make poor decisions and screw them over. Sorry, but the people are responsible for themselves. Those "vocal nutjobs in a position of power" were elected by the people, it's not like they took those positions by force, so obviously those "nutjobs" are reflecting the true attitudes of a majority of the population. The people of Texas have no one to blame but themselves.
I don't really agree with this. As I said in another post here, I don't understand why these scientists are still in Texas. They're not prevented from doing science by the US government (and its lack of funding); nothing is stopping them from applying for a job at CERN in Switzerland where all this great work is going on. So in fact, maybe merit really is a factor here, because if they're being turned down for these jobs, that shows they probably aren't as good as the people who do get to work there.
It does? How does the US lead, when the LHC is in Switzerland? Looks to me like Europe is leading in the area of high-energy physics, not the US.
What I don't understand is why these Texas scientists are upset, and why they're still in Texas. If all the work is in Europe, why wouldn't they just move there? That's the way it is when you're a professional; you only have a limited amount of choice in where you get to live, because you have to move to where the work is for your chosen industry. For instance, if you're a petroleum engineer, you're probably not going to get to live in Hawaii, since there's no oil there (that I'm aware of off the top of my head). If you're a VLSI designer, you're not going to get to work in Maine, since there's no companies there doing that work. High-energy physics doesn't seem like a career with tons of places to work.
It's not the only political thing with a terrible name in this country; remember the "Information Superhighway" (which everyone else called the "internet") term that politicians were throwing around for a while?
I completely disagree. Ballmer needs to stay right where he is. He's doing a great job... of running the company straight into the ground, and I couldn't be happier about it. I look forward to the day when MS collapses and goes the way of Borders books, Circuit City, and soon Best Buy. I really hope the MS shareholders don't make any changes in leadership there before it's too late.
Arizona gets a lot of shit too, but the power grid here is even more reliable, since the only "storms" we get are dust storms and rare thunderstorms with high winds. We never get ice storms, hurricanes, tornadoes (except for "dust devils" that you can walk through if you want), etc.
But we don't have any portable generators either.
Most of the heaviest things (motors, airco) in homes still run on 110V even though 220V has been available in most homes but most homes haven't been wired correctly for 220V
No, they don't. HVAC, ranges, ovens, clothes dryers, hot water heating tanks (if electric), are always 220V in American homes. Every house in America is wired with 220V, and pretty much always has been. The 110V is derived from the 220V (line-to-line) by splitting it with a neutral in the electric panel.
It hasn't changed much if any. You generally have to get a cab to go from a NYC-area airport to anywhere, and it's expensive as hell and feels like you might not survive (probably like taking a cab in Turkey). There's some pretty good public transit right (if a bit old) in Manhattan, one of the five "boroughs" or districts of NYC, but outside of that, it sucks.
The wires you saw were probably DSL or cable (TV/internet) wires retrofitted onto the older buildings. When stuff like that is installed in an older building in this country (where "older" means any age, just that those wires weren't installed during construction, whether it was 100 years ago or 2), installers do the fastest, cheapest job they can, so if that means drilling a big hole in the side of the building and stringing wires haphazardly, that's what they do. It's not just NYC, they do it in suburban houses across the country too.
However, there's an important reason things are done this way here. Our corporate executives get bigger compensation packages and golden parachutes than anyone else in the world.
That doesn't make sense, why would anyone keep staff who work maybe only 3 weeks a year? If anything, there should be contractors who can soak up random spikes in demand.
OK, and what exactly are these contractors going to do for the rest of the year, sit on their asses and wait for a call?
Some forward thinking people set aside money to fix the things they build.
It's not really idiocy driving these actions I think, it's pure greed. It's not that the people running these companies are too stupid to plan ahead, they simply realize that doing so costs more money in the short term, so they don't bother, so they can get bigger bonuses. They don't care about the long term costs, because they're going to collect their bonuses and golden parachutes and leave the later problems for their successors to deal with.
Having the companies run directly by the government I don't think is likely to make things much better, at least not with the way the public currently votes. Just look at the USPS; it actually seems to be being run OK, given what they have to work with, but Congress is busy trying to destroy it with a 2006 law pushed by lobbyists that requires the USPS to pre-fund the retirement pensions of all the employees, something no private company has to do, and which is bankrupting the USPS. When the government is trying to destroy government-run companies for political purposes, having the company be government-run isn't going to help. The whole country's culture is broken. It's just like Mexico.
Look at any after the fact analysis of any disaster and you will see that the regulators are the bitches of the industry. Enron, Deep Water Horizon, Halliburton, Exxon, or a coal disaster.
Yep, there's a term for that, I think it's "regulatory capture"; basically, the regulators are cronies of the industries, as the mentality is that you need an industry insider to understand how to regulate that industry, but obviously what happens is the regulator's good buddies with the people in the industry so he doesn't bother to do much regulating. Just another feature of Crony Capitalism.
This is a good point. Tons of people are crying now because their A/C doesn't work and it's hot, but the power demands for whole-house A/C are huge, whereas a small room air conditioner uses much less power.
That's not *so* bad; for one thing, most mobile-specific sites I've seen have a selection somewhere to "view full site". But anyway, at least these companies' web designers have recognized that users of mobile devices might do better with a website tailored to their small-screen device, while still leaving the normal site as-is for desktop users. If the UI "experts" from Gnome or Microsoft, for instance, were in charge, these companies would all simply dump their regular sites, and only allow users to use the touch-friendly mobile versions, even if they're using a desktop with a 30" monitor.
I seriously doubt that. Maybe the incidence is higher in certain countries where the social environment is very bad, such as Somalia and the USA, but not everywhere.
Exactly, agreed 100%. There's a lot of problems with the AC's position, both practical and moral. People have a biological imperative to raise their own kids; telling them to not bother and to raise someone else's instead isn't going to sit well with the richer people. Telling the poor people they're not going to be allowed to keep their kids, and that their natural children will be forcibly removed from their custody at gunpoint isn't going to sit well with the poor people or with most others. How much of the voting public do you really think will be onboard with the idea of using poor people as breeding stock, for various reasons? Plus, what do you do with all the kids who have problems? It's not generally rich people who produce crack babies, kids with fetal alcohol syndrome, etc. There's a reason richer people who use surrogates have strict contracts about how the birth mother must take care of herself during gestation; having a child gestate in a mother that's malnourished (or eating the shit that passes for food in the USA these days), or who smokes or drinks or uses drugs, results in a child with developmental problems. Having poor people be used as baby factories is about the dumbest idea I've seen someone support here in a long time.
Possibly true; however it's more environmentally unfriendly for those who have kids that will continue to act socially irresponsibly. If the kids are raised with environmental awareness as an important factor, there'll probably be a net benefit for the environment overall. If we only allow the irresponsible and dumb to breed, the environment will suffer far worse.
Not necessarily. Sure, in the short term the environment will suffer more, but if we only allow the dumb to breed, then before too long society will simply collapse, as there's no was that a population of morons and irresponsible people can continue the way industrialized societies are going now; it simply requires too much skill and expertise by many different people to keep it going, and if too many things start failing then you're looking at food riots and total collapse and a big die-off of population, sorta like what happened on Rapa Nui but on a much larger scale.
That really depends on the animal and the child. What if your kid is a sociopath? I knew an older lady like this; her (grown, 20s) son was obviously a sociopath and even tried to convince her to sign all her property into his name, so he could kick her out and sell her house. She finally cut off all contact with him. I wonder if some people have multiple kids for this or a similar reason: if one dies early or turns out to be a shitball, at least you have one or two other chances of having a kid you're proud of and who returns your love.
At least with dogs and cats, if they're not working out in your home environment, you can give them away to someone else or take them back to the (hopefully no-kill) shelter.
And the bad part about all this is that, in today's society, unless you come from a very wealthy family that will bankroll you while you're young so you can raise their grandchildren, you need to spend your younger years in college and working on your career so you can have financial stability to raise a family without going broke. I grew up in a household that didn't have that stability, and it wasn't fun worrying about money all the time when I was 10 or so.
It's even worse for women since their best childbearing years are in their 20s, which is precisely the time it's absolutely the worst for them to have a kid financially, and by the time they're 40, they're frequently unable to do so. Worse yet is that having a child usually has an extremely negative effect on their career, unless they've established themselves well (which again, by this time they're now not very fertile).
I will say, however, that I'm almost 40 myself and I don't feel like I'm any less energetic than I was at 25.
As for adoption, there again you need financial stability, and unlike having your own kids, you really do *need* it. You can be poor and have your own kids, though it's a crappy life for the kids; but if you're poor, they won't allow you to adopt. Plus, adoption is difficult; people say there's all these extra kids out there, but there's a reason Americans frequently travel to Asia or Eastern Europe to adopt: there are very few healthy ones available. Almost no one wants to adopt a special-needs child (and for good reason, as you say, it's a huge amount of work to raise normal kids, but at least there the work steadily decreases after they're a couple years old and can do more and more things for themselves; with special-needs kids you're stuck doing everything for them for their whole lives, to varying degrees).
As an engineer, I can only see a couple of solutions to this growing problem in society: 1) change society so that people have kids in their 20s while everyone else bankrolls them, and then start on their careers in their 30s; this isn't likely to happen since we already hate giving people welfare to sit around and not work; 2) change society so that most women have kids at 20 and immediately give them to older couples to adopt; this isn't likely to work or be good for the kids, since biologically and sociologically it seems kids are better off raised by their own parents, particularly their own mother; 3) go back to the "village raises a child" society; not likely to happen since a greater population generally requires greater urbanization and less tribalism; and finally 4) re-engineer human biology so that we can have kids at 50 or 60 and still be young enough to raise them and enjoy the experience; this will require greatly increasing the human lifespan, so basically we need to put our hope (and funding) in Aubrey de Grey and his anti-senescence work.
My last D-Link router (DI-624) wouldn't allow me to print from a wireless device to my ethernet-connected HP printer after I upgraded the firmware (downgrading to the old version worked), and they ignored my complaints about the bug and never fixed it. Sorry, I can't buy a D-Link after that experience.
This sounds like BS to me. Burns, sure. 3rd-degree burns, however, mean that the skin is charred; most people never experience this, and only at the worst experience 2nd-degree burns, where you have redness and blistering. 2nd degree burns are extremely painful, worse than 1st degree (which is sunburn, scalds, etc.). 3rd degree burns, OTOH, are not painful at all, because the nerves have burned away and you can't feel anything.
The idea that someone would sit still and allow their skin to be burnt to char seems ridiculous to me; you have to first progress through the 1st and 2nd degree stages which are extremely painful themselves, and then in the 3rd degree stage you'll smell the unmistakable stench of burning flesh (there's nothing that smells like it, once you've smelled it once, you'll remember it forever).
It likely will, but for most users only for brief durations and infrequently. However, people do run their battery down from time to time, and then plug it in and start doing something computationally intensive, so the power supply has to be able to handle that.
I guess you've never tried to get green wood to burn. It can be done, but it's not easy.
I'm sure that's true, but it's cold comfort to someone stuck in a company that really is so retarded they won't use it no matter what even the boss says.