Relax, it's always been this way. IMHO it's because in the real world almost nobody - no company, and no person - follows best practices of today. At best they're running two or three years behind as the information soaks in through the semipermeable membrane of information flow through the folks who actually read up on this stuff daily, through their awareness, through mentions in group and company meetings every three months or so, into the IT management's headspace, into the implementation plan that is always full of more projects than the group has time to implement, and finally (likely when some big news item hits that makes it mandatory) IT accepts the need to upgrade. Then, since there are several dozen or hundreds of servers and each one despite best efforts is slightly different than any others, and they're all running different applications, the upgrades have to be tested on each configuration prior to rollout. So, two or three years.
Migrating systems to new versions imposes not only effort but risk on the company. And it's a rare company that isn't running some service or application that they bought in 1942, that only runs on a particular obsolete brand and version and can't be replaced without a major impact on operations.
At one time an IBM rep told me that the majority of his customers in the small city where I lived were running an OS version that had been EOL'd eight years earlier. This was an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" strategy - why buy new hardware and software if the old one works fine? That was before networking made security updates such a big deal - few systems even had timesharing, much less networking.
IDK if it's still true, but back in the late 1990s every country had a different policy regarding satellite connections. Some of them did not allow either up or down, some had onerous fees and taxes (and often bribes), some allowed but you had to register the equipment and the service. And, of course, companies will charge what the market will bear in each country.
Back in the late 1990s I worked for Schlumberger Ltd. Their remote well logging trucks, which can be found anywhere there might be oil, on land, used a Ku-band Very Small Aperture terminal. They developed these in conjunction with Hughes. This system communicates with a geostationary satellite, using a dish mounted on the back of the truck. Back then they were running only 56Kb/s but according to the article cited it's available up to 4Mb/s today. A typical transmission from the truck could be hundreds of megabytes, so the system had to be pretty reliable in most kinds of weather. Considering the remote locations and extreme conditions that oil well drillers have to put up with, I would think that this is likely to be the most robust, reliable and effective system you can get. But my information is more than 10 years out of date, so YMMV.
One of the classic questions in systems philosophy is, when we talk about a system, are we talking about the system or a model of the system? (There's a term for this, I'm not expressing this correctly, it's been a while since I bandied this phraseology around, but hey.) Both are true, and yet both are false depending on your perspective at the moment. I think it was someone at Santa Fe who originally described the term complex adaptive system as a "euphemism for life" - real, messy, adaptive life. In most cases I tend to prefer to view a system as the thing itself, which I may be modeling.
The point of both positive and negative feedbacks being required for any stable system is true of all dynamic systems.
The question of where the boundaries of a system are is also dependent on the question being asked.
Whether capitalism or communism, or any other ism, IMHO "Your -ism is wrong". All -isms (even this one?:) ) are attempts to constrain some aspect of the real world into a rational, or (worse) logical, system. The real world, especially living part of it, just doesn't do that - it's fundamentally a-rational (at least the social and life components). But a CAS tends to converge toward a maximum benefit or minimum error for all environmental inputs perceived by the CAS - that's what life does. In this case, the error surface is in a space of an almost arbitrary dimensions, with dimensions appearing and disappearing continuously. So I'm arguing for the case that the CAS in question _is_ the economy & polity, not a model of it - though we certainly can construct models of it.
I was not calling the CAS capitalism, but the converse. I was referring to capitalism (really free enterprise - I'll stipulate that capitalism is just one model of free enterprise) as a less-bad model of the CAS that constitutes an economy (or a market, or whatnot) than communism.:) 'Free enterprise' a is really a better term than capitalism for this CAS viewpoint. As you note, an economy both does and doesn't contain all those influences you mention, depending on perspective. And that is why capitalism and communism both are not very good models (although the concept of satisficing which broadens the perspective regarding value, and the notion that free enterprise is a CAS, help a lot for the free enterprise case).
So, by way of agreement with your last paragraph, capitalism will tend to be 'successful' to the extent that it successfuly models a CAS. IMHO the fundamental failure of communism (as demonstrated by the simple lack of necessary feedback) is that its entire direction is the opposite direction from a CAS.
One might complain that in a pure free enterprise system, "It's a jungle out there!". And that's mostly OK, with some constraints. A jungle makes optimum use of every resource available, and also responds dynamically and rapidly to every change in the environment. I think organic gardening makes a pretty good analogic approach to how to manage an economy/polity - don't spray every bug you see, but encourage the things you want by proper provision of what they need.
That's really a different topic, though I don't disagree with your assessment. If you haven't already, I suggest reading "Last and First Men" and the associated "Star Maker" by Olaf Stapledon, a friend of Einstein's IIRC.
Someone (Gould?) pointed out that the individual of a species becomes less fit as the species itself becomes more integrated. Civilization certainly has the effect of reducing the relative fitness of the individuals in it. As a case in point, some people are now arguing that human IQ has dropped since we became civilized, and similarly I as an example, might very well not have survived various illnesses and personal 'minor' disabilities without the comforts of civilization - and think about all those folks whose bad teeth have been hidden with orthodontics, to reproduce children with bad teeth.
As someone once said, "we are just mobile apartment houses for germs."
As you allude, every multicellular life form is a complex of individuals that have given up some aspects of their individuality to work together. Civilizations are just the same but exist in information space rather than gene space. And we all together constitute Terran 'Life'. When humans begin to terraform migrate into the Solar System, and if/when we build interstellar seed ships and propagate to other star systems, we will basically be doing the analogous thing to the spores of a fern or a mushroom. The individual lives (human plus all the species of life we bring with us) inside the seedship are just the cells that constitute the living part of the spore.
PS - I looked at your neural net thing, but didn't really get the gist.
I, and others, would argue that this scenario is both post-communist and post-capitalist (at least locally - who built the space ship?) both systems in the formal sense are attempts to impose a rational method of managing scarcity within an arational ecosystem. But I might argue that free enterprise, which is itself a complex adaptive system, will continue to be relevant as it adapts to this new ecosystem.
Automation may not be the correct term - the combination of ubiquitous information and 3D printing are going to take us in that direction but it's not automation in the classic sense. (As a space advocate, I'll also point that some pretty good analysis seems to demonstrate the space development has the potential to improve the world standard of living by a factor of 10 over the next 100 years. So add that into the puzzle.)
I'm presently reading "Accellerando" which is a fascinating SF book that goes from Slashdot to posthumanism, and among other things takes money, described as a 2nd derivative of a linear demand function, to an object-relational complex that incorporates all aspects of a transaction, and proposes Economics 2.0. It's a free E-Book.
Of course there is, but the differences are outcomes of the isms. (One of my former sigs was "Your -ism is wrong" - every '-ism' is essentially an attempt to impose a rational formal structure on living systems, which are inherently arational. That doesn't make the analysis worthless, but demonstrates the relative benefit of a free enterprise system (which I agree is related to, but not quite the same as, a capitalist system. I should be more clear on that distinction and use the former instead. My bad - I tend to equate the two). A free enterprise system, as a complex adaptive system in itself, will always tend to converge toward the most 'efficient' or 'minimal error' surface in the ecosystem.
One of the more telling examples is the rise of black markets in every instance of a communist or socialist system. This is free enterprise, adapting in a variety of ways, to the ecosystem. Black markets are the economic equivalent of weeds in the pavement, or weeds in the wheat field if you prefer.
And yet, in almost every market, we see one or two companies dominating more than half the market. By your analysis that's way, way too much monopolistic power, and it's the norm.
IMHO (I haven't done the rigorous analysis, but based on what work I have done) this is an example of the failure of regulation, or (equivalently) a failed legal structure for the modern context. For the last 100+ years, most legal structures have encouraged monopoly or near-monopoly, often justified by the assumed greater efficiencies that could, and admittedly did, greatly improve our standards of living. Certainly the cars we drive today and most products and services benefit from mass production. This was definitely justifiable by the need for mile-long steel mills of the first half of the 20th century. Even when car production of a single company exceeded the possible capacity of single plants, and plants began to be placed throughout the world, there was still some justification for a General Motors from a production point of view as they could use a single design and mold-making capability and distribute it across many plants. But now that can be done without being within a single corporate structure.
But for at least 20 years, perhaps 50 years, the drive for bigness has been for financial leverage, not production efficiency. That leverage encourages, and needs, the ecosystem to be the same everywhere in order to outcompete the local niche players. Which goes right to your second point, which I agree with completely, and which is why it is important to my mind to reverse the drive to normalize legal and economic structures everywhere - its primary effect is to drive local players out of the ecosystem.
With today's ubiquitous capacity for information transfer, and also 3D printing, I think small and local (two different things, but related) entities have an opportunity to make the mega corporations obsolete. The RIAA and MPAA legal fights may be examples of the dying gasps of obsolete economic structures. In sum, I think the ecosystem has just been changed. Will GM sue to prevent others from using 3D printing to replicate a tail light lens to replace a broken one from a 1967 Camaro?
Haha. So the fact that I did not take the time (and 40-plus pages - an unusual size for a slashdot posting) to provide a definitive, line-by-line critique of Marx's entire body of work demonstrates to you an apparent lack of understanding? Fah.
Slashdot comments are, at best, a shorthand. I suppose that all the other philosophers, mathematicians, and social scientists who have completely eviscerated Marx's pathetic lack of logic, misunderstanding of the business world around him, and irrational rantings (which are more about the remaining dregs of post-feudal aristocracies in Europe, which were valid targets of complaint, than about the economic systems that were just beginning arise in his day) also don't "have any understanding of anything he wrote". That's amusing.
So I'll put the discussion on the other foot: Your statement demonstrates that you have neither read nor understood anything about complex adaptive systems (upon which I based my original comments), which, even if Marx actually had any connection with the real world of his day (having never actually had a real job in the 'evil capitalistic system' and spent literally his whole adult life in the warm comfy confines of an extremist self-flagellating society), makes both his work and the work of many _real_ classical economists obsolete, as they nearly all are analyzing linear or at best simple mathematical approximations of how real economies and polities work.
I suggest you spend a year or so studying, yourself. You can start with the citations on CAS from Wikipedia, then a few dozen various publications from the Santa Fe Institute. Then read "Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos ", some of which is controversial among CAS researchers, but worthy of review.
Then, come back in a year and tell me how Marx even makes sense, especially in the context of modern society. Till then, don't bother me. And, if you want, feel free to read "Accellerando", which takes the concept of money from second derivative linear measure to an object-relational complex that incorporates all aspects of an exchange - an intriguing idea.
Greenspan was often called her disciple in the 1960s, but IMHO he made an error when he moved into the financial world and tried to use his version of objectivism to manage the Fed, and the Wall Streeters. He later admitted he was wrong. Except for the impact of technological advances (such as high speed trading, and other innovations), most of Wall Street is as close to a zero sum game as any part of business, and the motivations are not creative but manipulative.
It's hard to correlate conservatism (ultra or otherwise) with objectivism, because the meaning of both conservatism and (US) liberalism continually changes.
I think the master and slave notion is right from the book - your analogy of animal and man is collinear with that so I don't disagree - but it's been about 40 years, so who knows?:) Certainly one of the apparently key requirements for slaveholders to maintain their self-image is to categorize their slaves as subhuman. To me this smacks of a weird rationalization. (Suggestion - read "Making Whiteness" - fascinating analysis of the psychosocial history of the post-Civil war South and its impact on the rest of the nation.)
I think I'm a bit insulted, or else you misunderstood me. For that term paper (9th grade) I read Marx, Engels, and others. In fact I got in a lot of trouble for doing so, since this was back in the cold war era - the teacher flunked me for the paper and for the term, and screamed at me for an hour after school. Fortunately wiser heads prevailed and I was put in advanced placement classes after that. My "thing" has always been Systems Science in various forms, including most required classes for an MS in SS. I have continued to study this area, and in fact was on track to get the PhD in Economics, concentrating my research on the complex adaptive systems approach to economics. I'm tempted to respond with an expletive here, but I resist. "Central Planning" is really just a hack to try to make something work, which (as we have seen so many times it's a wonder anyone even bothers any more) is doomed to failure.
(I'm amused by the fact that most large corporations operate internally via a central planning model, which is partly why they are so frustrating to work in. It will be interesting to see how the new post-capitalist networks of doers who just call each other up and assemble a structure-of-the-moment to accomplish a goal will compare.)
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". A succinct, compassionate, and efficient "prime directive" for any "we the people" if you ask me
is an example of the classic liberal confusion of wishes (or goals, if you prefer) with facts. Such a goal can only be reached as an outcome of a system that successfully promotes it, and communism doesn't - the lack of feedback again means it is irrevocably broken.
A free enterprise system does a much better job of meeting those two criteria on a dynamic, stable basis. For instance, as a generality "from each according to his ability" is determined in a free enterprise system as an increasing cost factor as the "from" gets close to the maximum that person is willing to provide, where (as I noted), creating an internally damped feedback loop. In other words, as the demand for my services goes up, I charge more. Under the communist model there is no way to do that except by political means - i.e. management decides what your "ability" is, regardless of your opinion - again, no feedback loop. The quota must be met even if it kills you.
Your example of China is misdirected. It was, in fact, more definitively WalMart and other companies who brought so many people into the global middle class - by some estimates 100 million people by WalMart alone. And this all happened _after_ China began to move away from the communist ideal and started to allow and encourage private enterprise. Today China is only communist in the sense that it is a police state that maintains itself on persistent corruption and its use of power to achieve wealth (a sure sign of a non-capitalist system). From what I've seen, central plannning in China is presently restricted to infrastructure and theft by the powers that be. But I will accept the _possibility_ that what central planning that is done in China today might be a necessary transitional phase while the Chinese gradually learn how to behave in a society of mutual trust and modern "middle class" economic values.
As for being wrong, au contraire. The math on my side is well established and applies equally well to complex adaptive systems ranging from economies to forests. The 100+ years of the eventual failure of all attempts at communism - see Venezuela for a recent example also speaks to the issue.
As an aside, I'm presently reading an SF novel "Accellerando" by Charles Stross, (available as a free e-book) which proposes a post-capitalist, post-communist economic system based on the freedome of information. He argues that with the vast availability of almost all information at a moment's notice, all economic systems based on scarcity and rationing may become obsolete.
You make a useful point - through most of US, if not global, history, there has been the thread of the creative, explorer, or pioneer who probably has support from investors, governments, other parties, etc. Columbus is perhaps an archetypical example - he spent something like 10 years trying to get various monarchs (Portugal, Spain, England, maybe even Italy) to fund his expedition to go West to find the East. (He was rejected several times by Isabella and Ferdinand because their advisers pointed out that his estimate of the diameter of the Earth was about 1/2 what the experts thought - they were in fact correct!) More recently, the American pioneers, and the American railroads, depended on government land grants.
Nevertheless there is a difference. All of your examples fit the mold of people who, given or finding an advantage, ran with it and created something new, or had a dream and put together the resources to make it happen. Without Columbus, Spain would not have become such a major economic and political power - it had just essentially given up rights to most of Africa and the South Atlantic to the Portuguese after a military defeat. In fact, Ferdinand and Isabella were acting as VCs, with the expectation that they would never see Columbus again, but their situation was bad enough that it was worth trying this low-cost fling. It worked out pretty well (except arguably for the folks who lived here already...)
Lots of other people had fathers who taught mathematics; lots of people have had all the right tools but never did anything with them. Heck, I'm a pretty good example - back in 1981 I came up with the idea of 3D printing (I worked in a group that built flatbed printers), and I even assembled some of the components I needed to build a prototype. But I never carried through with it. Maybe that was partly luck, and/or going a different direction, or whatever - but the fact remains that I could have created the 3D printing market 30 years ago.
IMHO Obama's assertion that "you didn't build that" was IMHO a combination of economic illiteracy, stupidity, socialist idealism, and political "big lie" technique. Sure, every "great man" has a variety of supports that made it possible. But that does not counter the principle. Taken to its extreme, you can say that Columbus was no more important than the guy who baked his breakfast the morning he left Palos de la Frontera.
No. Capitalism has a host of feedback mechanisms - supply and demand being the archetypical one. Like any good complex adaptive system, when a new 'species' (for example a new technology and resulting new market) appears, the other entities in the system dynamically adapt. This is very similar to the evolutionary ecosystems model. Political feedback, to my mind, should mainly be of the sort that prevents fish that are too big from swimming up small creeks and blocking water flow. (I know that's a really obscure analogy, but I like it.
A major distortion that exists presently is what I would consider incorrect government policies that encourage near-monopolies and effective monopolies. In the US, anti-trust laws are directed primarily at maintaining two things: preventing unfair advantage of a company's monopoly position, and maintaining a fiction of competition among two to four dominant players.
If I had my druthers, I would prevent any company with more than 10% of a market to buy or take control of any other market participant for any reason.
From my own studies of free enterprise as a CAS, it appears to me that if any company controls more than perhaps 20% of a market, or if fewer than 10 or so companies constitute a large percentage of a market, they have effectively too much monopoly power. I have not done the research in detail - I was prepared to work on the PhD in Economics and this was going to be my area of research, but I did not pursue it at that time, so these are 'back of the envelope' numbers.
Nevertheless, it's instructive to use ecosystems as an analogy. A climax forest may have only a dozen or so tree species but it is very rare for it to have as few as four or five. Aspen trees are interesting - a particular aspen grove may in fact be a single genetic individual. But the environment varies enough that this grove can not take over 100 square miles. This is because the local environment changes constantly, so the area next to the Aspen grove may be better for maple, or fir, or scrub grassland.
So to maintain the maximum diversity, and dynamic adaptability and efficiency, the role of government regulation is absolutely _not_ to provide a single market. (I.e., do _not_ normalize the laws across all jurisdictions.) That made sense when the economies of scale truly applied - it took a lot of money to build a steel mill. But economies of scale now are primarily tools of capitalist domination. If a large company is truly more competive than small companies, then this should be the case across many jurisdictions with differing local rules. Normalizing the rules across jurisdictions is unfairly (IMHO) handicapping smaller businesses, which as it happens often have lower unit costs these days than large companies. Case in point - labor productivity at a MacDonald's franchise is substantially _lower_ than at the old mom and pop hamburger joint - this is due to two things - MacDonald's already made your burger so it's faster, and every MacDonald's burger is the same - no guessing. But both of those are obsolete criteria in today's world of freely available information.
At one time, the number of jurisdictions was large, and the information flow between them was relatively slow, so this was not such a large problem. But now we are close to having a single global economic model. This puts the entire economic system at constant risk - e.g. "Too big to fail". This idea is in itself a condemnation of the legal structure we have allowed to develop. And now with the availability of incredibly fast means to rationalize markets, that legal structure is, oddly enough, a bad idea. Today we need more diverse markets, not more similar markets. And that is where the political factor comes in. Or, as I've said to many of my friends, "All decisions should be made as locally as feasible," - whether economic or political.
My reply to both you and the parent is that IMHO most people (including Greenspan, and all of Wall Street) misinterpret Rand. If you recall, the protagonists in each of her books is a builder, not a financier. They were virulently opposed to those who used manipulation of the economic and political system for their own gains. Her books were really about the importance of the creative and technical versus the political.
I think it was Nietzche ("Man and Superman"?) who proposed the dichotomy between masters and slaves. I have always felt that he was wrong, that while those two groups may exist, there is a third group, the technical/creative, who does not want to be master and refuses to be slave.
Fah. I was only 14 when I did a comparative analysis of communism and capitalism. Having some background in electronics theory and associated systems approach, I was able to demonstrate that communism is always doomed, because it is not a stable economic system. All stable systems must have both positive and negative feedback loops. (The screech when you put a microphone too close to a speaker is one example of a runaway system, that finally blows something if not corrected.) The classic aphorism of communism is "too each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities". This is essentially two uncoupled, undamped systems with unlimited response - some people have "unlimited needs" and work the system; other people will be worked to death.
I later discovered that in the real world, this lack of feedback in the economic system is dealt with in two ways - feedback through the political system (corruption of various sorts, political appointments, etc.), and through the black market - a hidden ad hoc capitalist mechanism, often with a political component (bribing the officials).
So regardless of capitalism, communism is a dead end, and makes no mathematical, much less economic, sense. There is a kind of 'communism of the rich' which is analogous to what techies do with open source, and what Star Trek assumed due to the Replicator technology. It's basically, "to each according to his needs, there's plenty to go around."
While capitalism has its issues, it is a dynamic complex adaptive system where the excesses can be curbed by _reasonable_ regulation. The complaints that Marx had back in the 1800s were in response to the excesses of what was basically a post-feudal era where companies were generally owned by one, or a small set, of people with zero requirement to take into account any public opinion, and could act as feudal barons. The rise of incorporation has moved capitalism increasingly toward an economically democratic model, where every company must take into account the political and economic environment.
In practice, no communist government has resulted in 'free people', except in the sense (as an old Soviet joke goes), "we are free - to work ourselves to death"
The current situation is a special case, where Congress can't act at all, but that's because of the 'Tea Party' fringe right which refuses to respect the democratic will of the majority or that anyone else in the country deserves a vote or input.
It takes two. Blaming the "Tea Party" is just succumbing to the popular press, which besides being innumerate is also almost unanimously pro-left - the last study I saw, about five years ago, showed that the Washington media personnel self-identify as either liberal, socialist or communist by 12 to 1. Most Washington news organizations do not have a single centrist, much less a conservative, on the editorial or reporting staff. Obama in this last episode took the position that he would not go for any compromise. The House passed IIRC over a dozen different bills providing various compromise positions, including one that differed from the Obama position only in postponing the individual mandate by one year. That also was rejected by the Administration. So blaming the "Tea Party fringe right" seems to me to be a blind acceptance of what the press Obama groupies have been spouting.
The "fringe right" as you call it is pretty close to the fiscal position of John F Kennedy, who ran on a platform to cut the cost of government and balancing the budget. Which is what he did - regardless of what one thinks of the rest of Kennedy, that is what he did - cut spending, cut taxes, and balanced the budget (incidentally triggering an economic boom in the 1960s). That was the first time since (IIRC) Grover Cleveland where the federal budget was actually balanced, and the last time until Clinton, who fought tooth and nail to prevent the Republican attempts to reduce spending, finally acquiesced, and managed to get the press and the public believing it was his idea.
Going back to the particular question of fiscal discipline, what does one do when one _knows_ that continuing on the present path is proceeding to destruction? One of the primary purposes of representative (small-r "republican") government is to moderate and counter the whims of the "herd" and to act according to principle rather than popularity. Throughout history, leading right up to present-day Argentina and Venezuela, democracies have _all_ gone through the cycle of prosperity to bread and circuses to bankruptcy to totalitarian rule. Fiscal conservatives continue to be amazed at how willing "most people" are to mortgage their future in order to get more toys today. If a school bus is heading down a dead end road and approaching a cliff, but everyone on the bus is saying, "Go faster!!", isn't it reasonable that those who know better should do whatever they can to prevent this catastrophe, despite what's popular? Especially when most of those people are uneducated about the geography, and the driver and the tour guide (i.e. the press) are saying "Relax, it's going to be fun!!"?
I will argue that part of the political problem is the boomers (of which I am one) - we grew up spoiled, filled with neo-socialist propaganda (see "The Closing of the American Mind" by Alan Bloom), and isolated without much chance to learn how to get along with each other or to how to be spouses and parents. For example, never having had to share a bedroom meant we never never really learned the art and necessity of compromise and living with someone else. We're arrogant, self-centered and always convinced we are right about everything. So, now we are running the political system, it is inherently dysfunctional. And that's not even counting those of us who are still lost in the 1960s, and think the hippie utopia was the best of all possible worlds, disregarding the realities of life. Someone once described American liberalism as confusing wishes with facts.
So, politics in the US at least will continue to be dysfunctional until we boomers age out of the power structure. Assuming the next generations aren't even worse...:P
I recall a study from several years ago (10 years? possibly) that showed the probability of failure increased with the size (budget) of the project. Above about $5 million in then-dollars the probability was near 100%. As I recall failure was defined as either technical failure, or budget overruns going so high the project was cancelled. Of course, I have no citation. That would be too easy.:)
The Standish Group, which has a database of some 50,000 development projects, looked at the outcomes of multimillion dollar development projects and ran the numbers for Computerworld.
Of 3,555 projects from 2003 to 2012 that had labor costs of at least $10 million, only 6.4% were successful. The Standish data showed that 52% of the large projects were "challenged," meaning they were over budget, behind schedule or didn't meet user expectations. The remaining 41.4% were failures -- they were either abandoned or started anew from scratch.
One could argue that the Administration's tactic of preventing release of critical design data until after the election, to prevent the opposition from using the true costs as a campaign issue, was sabotage de facto. This put the entire development process several months, perhaps a year, behind schedule.
You _could_ buy us each one, to atone for your sins.:D
Re:I thought it was the "do" keyword
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It's just vocabulary. In FORTRAN, "DO 100 I = 1,10" where 100 is the line number of the last statement in the loop means the same thing as "for (i=1;i=10;i++) {...} In the card, punch tape, and early 110 baud (10 chars/sec) teleprinter days shorter was very advantageous - the same reason that most of the common unix commands are two letters.
Re:not really for nerds and not stuff that matters
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Yes. It's not on the bits & bytes level, but the complexities are fundamentally similar and the answers can be just as, or more, difficult to figure out. And the additional impact can be enormous. I haven't had to actually roll out any cloud based services, but I'm looking at a couple right now for a presently-small-but-hopefully-larger business. Managing the loss of a SaaS vendor (for any reason) is analogous to a NAS or other major data center component blowing up (or preferably getting ready to die, so we can do something in advance) - questions like "where is the data backed up" and "how do we migrate our data to the new server/service" must be answered.
In both cases, in the ideal case all of the possibilities have been explored and contingency plans have been created (and maintained). For instance, it seems to naive me, for example, using cloud products that support the OpenStack standard, and having at least one running test/failover system either in-house or at another vendor's facility, along with other strategies, would minimize the potential impact and provide maximum flexibility. But it's never quite that simple.
Indeed. I signed up for their one month trial streaming service, and literally none of the movies I wanted to watch were available. A few were available on their DVD mailing service but that's not for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Relax, it's always been this way. IMHO it's because in the real world almost nobody - no company, and no person - follows best practices of today. At best they're running two or three years behind as the information soaks in through the semipermeable membrane of information flow through the folks who actually read up on this stuff daily, through their awareness, through mentions in group and company meetings every three months or so, into the IT management's headspace, into the implementation plan that is always full of more projects than the group has time to implement, and finally (likely when some big news item hits that makes it mandatory) IT accepts the need to upgrade. Then, since there are several dozen or hundreds of servers and each one despite best efforts is slightly different than any others, and they're all running different applications, the upgrades have to be tested on each configuration prior to rollout. So, two or three years.
Migrating systems to new versions imposes not only effort but risk on the company. And it's a rare company that isn't running some service or application that they bought in 1942, that only runs on a particular obsolete brand and version and can't be replaced without a major impact on operations.
At one time an IBM rep told me that the majority of his customers in the small city where I lived were running an OS version that had been EOL'd eight years earlier. This was an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" strategy - why buy new hardware and software if the old one works fine? That was before networking made security updates such a big deal - few systems even had timesharing, much less networking.
IDK if it's still true, but back in the late 1990s every country had a different policy regarding satellite connections. Some of them did not allow either up or down, some had onerous fees and taxes (and often bribes), some allowed but you had to register the equipment and the service. And, of course, companies will charge what the market will bear in each country.
Back in the late 1990s I worked for Schlumberger Ltd. Their remote well logging trucks, which can be found anywhere there might be oil, on land, used a Ku-band Very Small Aperture terminal. They developed these in conjunction with Hughes. This system communicates with a geostationary satellite, using a dish mounted on the back of the truck. Back then they were running only 56Kb/s but according to the article cited it's available up to 4Mb/s today. A typical transmission from the truck could be hundreds of megabytes, so the system had to be pretty reliable in most kinds of weather. Considering the remote locations and extreme conditions that oil well drillers have to put up with, I would think that this is likely to be the most robust, reliable and effective system you can get. But my information is more than 10 years out of date, so YMMV.
One of the classic questions in systems philosophy is, when we talk about a system, are we talking about the system or a model of the system? (There's a term for this, I'm not expressing this correctly, it's been a while since I bandied this phraseology around, but hey.) Both are true, and yet both are false depending on your perspective at the moment. I think it was someone at Santa Fe who originally described the term complex adaptive system as a "euphemism for life" - real, messy, adaptive life. In most cases I tend to prefer to view a system as the thing itself, which I may be modeling.
The point of both positive and negative feedbacks being required for any stable system is true of all dynamic systems.
The question of where the boundaries of a system are is also dependent on the question being asked.
Whether capitalism or communism, or any other ism, IMHO "Your -ism is wrong". All -isms (even this one? :) ) are attempts to constrain some aspect of the real world into a rational, or (worse) logical, system. The real world, especially living part of it, just doesn't do that - it's fundamentally a-rational (at least the social and life components). But a CAS tends to converge toward a maximum benefit or minimum error for all environmental inputs perceived by the CAS - that's what life does. In this case, the error surface is in a space of an almost arbitrary dimensions, with dimensions appearing and disappearing continuously. So I'm arguing for the case that the CAS in question _is_ the economy & polity, not a model of it - though we certainly can construct models of it.
I was not calling the CAS capitalism, but the converse. I was referring to capitalism (really free enterprise - I'll stipulate that capitalism is just one model of free enterprise) as a less-bad model of the CAS that constitutes an economy (or a market, or whatnot) than communism. :) 'Free enterprise' a is really a better term than capitalism for this CAS viewpoint. As you note, an economy both does and doesn't contain all those influences you mention, depending on perspective. And that is why capitalism and communism both are not very good models (although the concept of satisficing which broadens the perspective regarding value, and the notion that free enterprise is a CAS, help a lot for the free enterprise case).
So, by way of agreement with your last paragraph, capitalism will tend to be 'successful' to the extent that it successfuly models a CAS. IMHO the fundamental failure of communism (as demonstrated by the simple lack of necessary feedback) is that its entire direction is the opposite direction from a CAS.
One might complain that in a pure free enterprise system, "It's a jungle out there!". And that's mostly OK, with some constraints. A jungle makes optimum use of every resource available, and also responds dynamically and rapidly to every change in the environment. I think organic gardening makes a pretty good analogic approach to how to manage an economy/polity - don't spray every bug you see, but encourage the things you want by proper provision of what they need.
That's really a different topic, though I don't disagree with your assessment. If you haven't already, I suggest reading "Last and First Men" and the associated "Star Maker" by Olaf Stapledon, a friend of Einstein's IIRC.
Someone (Gould?) pointed out that the individual of a species becomes less fit as the species itself becomes more integrated. Civilization certainly has the effect of reducing the relative fitness of the individuals in it. As a case in point, some people are now arguing that human IQ has dropped since we became civilized, and similarly I as an example, might very well not have survived various illnesses and personal 'minor' disabilities without the comforts of civilization - and think about all those folks whose bad teeth have been hidden with orthodontics, to reproduce children with bad teeth.
As someone once said, "we are just mobile apartment houses for germs."
As you allude, every multicellular life form is a complex of individuals that have given up some aspects of their individuality to work together. Civilizations are just the same but exist in information space rather than gene space. And we all together constitute Terran 'Life'. When humans begin to terraform migrate into the Solar System, and if/when we build interstellar seed ships and propagate to other star systems, we will basically be doing the analogous thing to the spores of a fern or a mushroom. The individual lives (human plus all the species of life we bring with us) inside the seedship are just the cells that constitute the living part of the spore.
PS - I looked at your neural net thing, but didn't really get the gist.
I, and others, would argue that this scenario is both post-communist and post-capitalist (at least locally - who built the space ship?) both systems in the formal sense are attempts to impose a rational method of managing scarcity within an arational ecosystem. But I might argue that free enterprise, which is itself a complex adaptive system, will continue to be relevant as it adapts to this new ecosystem.
Automation may not be the correct term - the combination of ubiquitous information and 3D printing are going to take us in that direction but it's not automation in the classic sense. (As a space advocate, I'll also point that some pretty good analysis seems to demonstrate the space development has the potential to improve the world standard of living by a factor of 10 over the next 100 years. So add that into the puzzle.)
I'm presently reading "Accellerando" which is a fascinating SF book that goes from Slashdot to posthumanism, and among other things takes money, described as a 2nd derivative of a linear demand function, to an object-relational complex that incorporates all aspects of a transaction, and proposes Economics 2.0. It's a free E-Book.
Haha! I defer the opportunity to use that as a straight line. :D
Of course there is, but the differences are outcomes of the isms. (One of my former sigs was "Your -ism is wrong" - every '-ism' is essentially an attempt to impose a rational formal structure on living systems, which are inherently arational. That doesn't make the analysis worthless, but demonstrates the relative benefit of a free enterprise system (which I agree is related to, but not quite the same as, a capitalist system. I should be more clear on that distinction and use the former instead. My bad - I tend to equate the two). A free enterprise system, as a complex adaptive system in itself, will always tend to converge toward the most 'efficient' or 'minimal error' surface in the ecosystem.
One of the more telling examples is the rise of black markets in every instance of a communist or socialist system. This is free enterprise, adapting in a variety of ways, to the ecosystem. Black markets are the economic equivalent of weeds in the pavement, or weeds in the wheat field if you prefer.
And yet, in almost every market, we see one or two companies dominating more than half the market. By your analysis that's way, way too much monopolistic power, and it's the norm.
IMHO (I haven't done the rigorous analysis, but based on what work I have done) this is an example of the failure of regulation, or (equivalently) a failed legal structure for the modern context. For the last 100+ years, most legal structures have encouraged monopoly or near-monopoly, often justified by the assumed greater efficiencies that could, and admittedly did, greatly improve our standards of living. Certainly the cars we drive today and most products and services benefit from mass production. This was definitely justifiable by the need for mile-long steel mills of the first half of the 20th century. Even when car production of a single company exceeded the possible capacity of single plants, and plants began to be placed throughout the world, there was still some justification for a General Motors from a production point of view as they could use a single design and mold-making capability and distribute it across many plants. But now that can be done without being within a single corporate structure.
But for at least 20 years, perhaps 50 years, the drive for bigness has been for financial leverage, not production efficiency. That leverage encourages, and needs, the ecosystem to be the same everywhere in order to outcompete the local niche players. Which goes right to your second point, which I agree with completely, and which is why it is important to my mind to reverse the drive to normalize legal and economic structures everywhere - its primary effect is to drive local players out of the ecosystem.
With today's ubiquitous capacity for information transfer, and also 3D printing, I think small and local (two different things, but related) entities have an opportunity to make the mega corporations obsolete. The RIAA and MPAA legal fights may be examples of the dying gasps of obsolete economic structures. In sum, I think the ecosystem has just been changed. Will GM sue to prevent others from using 3D printing to replicate a tail light lens to replace a broken one from a 1967 Camaro?
Haha. So the fact that I did not take the time (and 40-plus pages - an unusual size for a slashdot posting) to provide a definitive, line-by-line critique of Marx's entire body of work demonstrates to you an apparent lack of understanding? Fah.
Slashdot comments are, at best, a shorthand. I suppose that all the other philosophers, mathematicians, and social scientists who have completely eviscerated Marx's pathetic lack of logic, misunderstanding of the business world around him, and irrational rantings (which are more about the remaining dregs of post-feudal aristocracies in Europe, which were valid targets of complaint, than about the economic systems that were just beginning arise in his day) also don't "have any understanding of anything he wrote". That's amusing.
So I'll put the discussion on the other foot: Your statement demonstrates that you have neither read nor understood anything about complex adaptive systems (upon which I based my original comments), which, even if Marx actually had any connection with the real world of his day (having never actually had a real job in the 'evil capitalistic system' and spent literally his whole adult life in the warm comfy confines of an extremist self-flagellating society), makes both his work and the work of many _real_ classical economists obsolete, as they nearly all are analyzing linear or at best simple mathematical approximations of how real economies and polities work.
I suggest you spend a year or so studying, yourself. You can start with the citations on CAS from Wikipedia, then a few dozen various publications from the Santa Fe Institute. Then read "Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos ", some of which is controversial among CAS researchers, but worthy of review.
Then, come back in a year and tell me how Marx even makes sense, especially in the context of modern society. Till then, don't bother me. And, if you want, feel free to read "Accellerando", which takes the concept of money from second derivative linear measure to an object-relational complex that incorporates all aspects of an exchange - an intriguing idea.
Greenspan was often called her disciple in the 1960s, but IMHO he made an error when he moved into the financial world and tried to use his version of objectivism to manage the Fed, and the Wall Streeters. He later admitted he was wrong. Except for the impact of technological advances (such as high speed trading, and other innovations), most of Wall Street is as close to a zero sum game as any part of business, and the motivations are not creative but manipulative.
It's hard to correlate conservatism (ultra or otherwise) with objectivism, because the meaning of both conservatism and (US) liberalism continually changes.
I think the master and slave notion is right from the book - your analogy of animal and man is collinear with that so I don't disagree - but it's been about 40 years, so who knows? :) Certainly one of the apparently key requirements for slaveholders to maintain their self-image is to categorize their slaves as subhuman. To me this smacks of a weird rationalization. (Suggestion - read "Making Whiteness" - fascinating analysis of the psychosocial history of the post-Civil war South and its impact on the rest of the nation.)
I think I'm a bit insulted, or else you misunderstood me. For that term paper (9th grade) I read Marx, Engels, and others. In fact I got in a lot of trouble for doing so, since this was back in the cold war era - the teacher flunked me for the paper and for the term, and screamed at me for an hour after school. Fortunately wiser heads prevailed and I was put in advanced placement classes after that. My "thing" has always been Systems Science in various forms, including most required classes for an MS in SS. I have continued to study this area, and in fact was on track to get the PhD in Economics, concentrating my research on the complex adaptive systems approach to economics. I'm tempted to respond with an expletive here, but I resist. "Central Planning" is really just a hack to try to make something work, which (as we have seen so many times it's a wonder anyone even bothers any more) is doomed to failure.
(I'm amused by the fact that most large corporations operate internally via a central planning model, which is partly why they are so frustrating to work in. It will be interesting to see how the new post-capitalist networks of doers who just call each other up and assemble a structure-of-the-moment to accomplish a goal will compare.)
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". A succinct, compassionate, and efficient "prime directive" for any "we the people" if you ask me
is an example of the classic liberal confusion of wishes (or goals, if you prefer) with facts. Such a goal can only be reached as an outcome of a system that successfully promotes it, and communism doesn't - the lack of feedback again means it is irrevocably broken.
A free enterprise system does a much better job of meeting those two criteria on a dynamic, stable basis. For instance, as a generality "from each according to his ability" is determined in a free enterprise system as an increasing cost factor as the "from" gets close to the maximum that person is willing to provide, where (as I noted), creating an internally damped feedback loop. In other words, as the demand for my services goes up, I charge more. Under the communist model there is no way to do that except by political means - i.e. management decides what your "ability" is, regardless of your opinion - again, no feedback loop. The quota must be met even if it kills you.
Your example of China is misdirected. It was, in fact, more definitively WalMart and other companies who brought so many people into the global middle class - by some estimates 100 million people by WalMart alone. And this all happened _after_ China began to move away from the communist ideal and started to allow and encourage private enterprise. Today China is only communist in the sense that it is a police state that maintains itself on persistent corruption and its use of power to achieve wealth (a sure sign of a non-capitalist system). From what I've seen, central plannning in China is presently restricted to infrastructure and theft by the powers that be. But I will accept the _possibility_ that what central planning that is done in China today might be a necessary transitional phase while the Chinese gradually learn how to behave in a society of mutual trust and modern "middle class" economic values.
As for being wrong, au contraire. The math on my side is well established and applies equally well to complex adaptive systems ranging from economies to forests. The 100+ years of the eventual failure of all attempts at communism - see Venezuela for a recent example also speaks to the issue.
As an aside, I'm presently reading an SF novel "Accellerando" by Charles Stross, (available as a free e-book) which proposes a post-capitalist, post-communist economic system based on the freedome of information. He argues that with the vast availability of almost all information at a moment's notice, all economic systems based on scarcity and rationing may become obsolete.
You make a useful point - through most of US, if not global, history, there has been the thread of the creative, explorer, or pioneer who probably has support from investors, governments, other parties, etc. Columbus is perhaps an archetypical example - he spent something like 10 years trying to get various monarchs (Portugal, Spain, England, maybe even Italy) to fund his expedition to go West to find the East. (He was rejected several times by Isabella and Ferdinand because their advisers pointed out that his estimate of the diameter of the Earth was about 1/2 what the experts thought - they were in fact correct!) More recently, the American pioneers, and the American railroads, depended on government land grants.
Nevertheless there is a difference. All of your examples fit the mold of people who, given or finding an advantage, ran with it and created something new, or had a dream and put together the resources to make it happen. Without Columbus, Spain would not have become such a major economic and political power - it had just essentially given up rights to most of Africa and the South Atlantic to the Portuguese after a military defeat. In fact, Ferdinand and Isabella were acting as VCs, with the expectation that they would never see Columbus again, but their situation was bad enough that it was worth trying this low-cost fling. It worked out pretty well (except arguably for the folks who lived here already...)
Lots of other people had fathers who taught mathematics; lots of people have had all the right tools but never did anything with them. Heck, I'm a pretty good example - back in 1981 I came up with the idea of 3D printing (I worked in a group that built flatbed printers), and I even assembled some of the components I needed to build a prototype. But I never carried through with it. Maybe that was partly luck, and/or going a different direction, or whatever - but the fact remains that I could have created the 3D printing market 30 years ago.
IMHO Obama's assertion that "you didn't build that" was IMHO a combination of economic illiteracy, stupidity, socialist idealism, and political "big lie" technique. Sure, every "great man" has a variety of supports that made it possible. But that does not counter the principle. Taken to its extreme, you can say that Columbus was no more important than the guy who baked his breakfast the morning he left Palos de la Frontera.
The romance of the creator having to deal with the political realities. In our own minds, we are all Mozart, Tesla, and John Galt. :)
No. Capitalism has a host of feedback mechanisms - supply and demand being the archetypical one. Like any good complex adaptive system, when a new 'species' (for example a new technology and resulting new market) appears, the other entities in the system dynamically adapt. This is very similar to the evolutionary ecosystems model. Political feedback, to my mind, should mainly be of the sort that prevents fish that are too big from swimming up small creeks and blocking water flow. (I know that's a really obscure analogy, but I like it.
A major distortion that exists presently is what I would consider incorrect government policies that encourage near-monopolies and effective monopolies. In the US, anti-trust laws are directed primarily at maintaining two things: preventing unfair advantage of a company's monopoly position, and maintaining a fiction of competition among two to four dominant players.
If I had my druthers, I would prevent any company with more than 10% of a market to buy or take control of any other market participant for any reason.
From my own studies of free enterprise as a CAS, it appears to me that if any company controls more than perhaps 20% of a market, or if fewer than 10 or so companies constitute a large percentage of a market, they have effectively too much monopoly power. I have not done the research in detail - I was prepared to work on the PhD in Economics and this was going to be my area of research, but I did not pursue it at that time, so these are 'back of the envelope' numbers.
Nevertheless, it's instructive to use ecosystems as an analogy. A climax forest may have only a dozen or so tree species but it is very rare for it to have as few as four or five. Aspen trees are interesting - a particular aspen grove may in fact be a single genetic individual. But the environment varies enough that this grove can not take over 100 square miles. This is because the local environment changes constantly, so the area next to the Aspen grove may be better for maple, or fir, or scrub grassland.
So to maintain the maximum diversity, and dynamic adaptability and efficiency, the role of government regulation is absolutely _not_ to provide a single market. (I.e., do _not_ normalize the laws across all jurisdictions.) That made sense when the economies of scale truly applied - it took a lot of money to build a steel mill. But economies of scale now are primarily tools of capitalist domination. If a large company is truly more competive than small companies, then this should be the case across many jurisdictions with differing local rules. Normalizing the rules across jurisdictions is unfairly (IMHO) handicapping smaller businesses, which as it happens often have lower unit costs these days than large companies. Case in point - labor productivity at a MacDonald's franchise is substantially _lower_ than at the old mom and pop hamburger joint - this is due to two things - MacDonald's already made your burger so it's faster, and every MacDonald's burger is the same - no guessing. But both of those are obsolete criteria in today's world of freely available information.
At one time, the number of jurisdictions was large, and the information flow between them was relatively slow, so this was not such a large problem. But now we are close to having a single global economic model. This puts the entire economic system at constant risk - e.g. "Too big to fail". This idea is in itself a condemnation of the legal structure we have allowed to develop. And now with the availability of incredibly fast means to rationalize markets, that legal structure is, oddly enough, a bad idea. Today we need more diverse markets, not more similar markets. And that is where the political factor comes in. Or, as I've said to many of my friends, "All decisions should be made as locally as feasible," - whether economic or political.
My reply to both you and the parent is that IMHO most people (including Greenspan, and all of Wall Street) misinterpret Rand. If you recall, the protagonists in each of her books is a builder, not a financier. They were virulently opposed to those who used manipulation of the economic and political system for their own gains. Her books were really about the importance of the creative and technical versus the political.
I think it was Nietzche ("Man and Superman"?) who proposed the dichotomy between masters and slaves. I have always felt that he was wrong, that while those two groups may exist, there is a third group, the technical/creative, who does not want to be master and refuses to be slave.
Fah. I was only 14 when I did a comparative analysis of communism and capitalism. Having some background in electronics theory and associated systems approach, I was able to demonstrate that communism is always doomed, because it is not a stable economic system. All stable systems must have both positive and negative feedback loops. (The screech when you put a microphone too close to a speaker is one example of a runaway system, that finally blows something if not corrected.) The classic aphorism of communism is "too each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities". This is essentially two uncoupled, undamped systems with unlimited response - some people have "unlimited needs" and work the system; other people will be worked to death.
I later discovered that in the real world, this lack of feedback in the economic system is dealt with in two ways - feedback through the political system (corruption of various sorts, political appointments, etc.), and through the black market - a hidden ad hoc capitalist mechanism, often with a political component (bribing the officials).
So regardless of capitalism, communism is a dead end, and makes no mathematical, much less economic, sense. There is a kind of 'communism of the rich' which is analogous to what techies do with open source, and what Star Trek assumed due to the Replicator technology. It's basically, "to each according to his needs, there's plenty to go around."
While capitalism has its issues, it is a dynamic complex adaptive system where the excesses can be curbed by _reasonable_ regulation. The complaints that Marx had back in the 1800s were in response to the excesses of what was basically a post-feudal era where companies were generally owned by one, or a small set, of people with zero requirement to take into account any public opinion, and could act as feudal barons. The rise of incorporation has moved capitalism increasingly toward an economically democratic model, where every company must take into account the political and economic environment.
In practice, no communist government has resulted in 'free people', except in the sense (as an old Soviet joke goes), "we are free - to work ourselves to death"
The current situation is a special case, where Congress can't act at all, but that's because of the 'Tea Party' fringe right which refuses to respect the democratic will of the majority or that anyone else in the country deserves a vote or input.
It takes two. Blaming the "Tea Party" is just succumbing to the popular press, which besides being innumerate is also almost unanimously pro-left - the last study I saw, about five years ago, showed that the Washington media personnel self-identify as either liberal, socialist or communist by 12 to 1. Most Washington news organizations do not have a single centrist, much less a conservative, on the editorial or reporting staff. Obama in this last episode took the position that he would not go for any compromise. The House passed IIRC over a dozen different bills providing various compromise positions, including one that differed from the Obama position only in postponing the individual mandate by one year. That also was rejected by the Administration. So blaming the "Tea Party fringe right" seems to me to be a blind acceptance of what the press Obama groupies have been spouting.
The "fringe right" as you call it is pretty close to the fiscal position of John F Kennedy, who ran on a platform to cut the cost of government and balancing the budget. Which is what he did - regardless of what one thinks of the rest of Kennedy, that is what he did - cut spending, cut taxes, and balanced the budget (incidentally triggering an economic boom in the 1960s). That was the first time since (IIRC) Grover Cleveland where the federal budget was actually balanced, and the last time until Clinton, who fought tooth and nail to prevent the Republican attempts to reduce spending, finally acquiesced, and managed to get the press and the public believing it was his idea.
Going back to the particular question of fiscal discipline, what does one do when one _knows_ that continuing on the present path is proceeding to destruction? One of the primary purposes of representative (small-r "republican") government is to moderate and counter the whims of the "herd" and to act according to principle rather than popularity. Throughout history, leading right up to present-day Argentina and Venezuela, democracies have _all_ gone through the cycle of prosperity to bread and circuses to bankruptcy to totalitarian rule. Fiscal conservatives continue to be amazed at how willing "most people" are to mortgage their future in order to get more toys today. If a school bus is heading down a dead end road and approaching a cliff, but everyone on the bus is saying, "Go faster!!", isn't it reasonable that those who know better should do whatever they can to prevent this catastrophe, despite what's popular? Especially when most of those people are uneducated about the geography, and the driver and the tour guide (i.e. the press) are saying "Relax, it's going to be fun!!"?
I will argue that part of the political problem is the boomers (of which I am one) - we grew up spoiled, filled with neo-socialist propaganda (see "The Closing of the American Mind" by Alan Bloom), and isolated without much chance to learn how to get along with each other or to how to be spouses and parents. For example, never having had to share a bedroom meant we never never really learned the art and necessity of compromise and living with someone else. We're arrogant, self-centered and always convinced we are right about everything. So, now we are running the political system, it is inherently dysfunctional. And that's not even counting those of us who are still lost in the 1960s, and think the hippie utopia was the best of all possible worlds, disregarding the realities of life. Someone once described American liberalism as confusing wishes with facts.
So, politics in the US at least will continue to be dysfunctional until we boomers age out of the power structure. Assuming the next generations aren't even worse... :P
I recall a study from several years ago (10 years? possibly) that showed the probability of failure increased with the size (budget) of the project. Above about $5 million in then-dollars the probability was near 100%. As I recall failure was defined as either technical failure, or budget overruns going so high the project was cancelled. Of course, I have no citation. That would be too easy. :)
However, I did search for "Probability of Software Project Failure", and got some fascinating results. This is one of them: Statistics over IT projects failure rate - a summary review of several of the most definitive studies over the last 20 years. And this one: Healthcare.gov website 'didn't have a chance in hell' notes that:
The Standish Group, which has a database of some 50,000 development projects, looked at the outcomes of multimillion dollar development projects and ran the numbers for Computerworld.
Of 3,555 projects from 2003 to 2012 that had labor costs of at least $10 million, only 6.4% were successful. The Standish data showed that 52% of the large projects were "challenged," meaning they were over budget, behind schedule or didn't meet user expectations. The remaining 41.4% were failures -- they were either abandoned or started anew from scratch.
And I suppose this: £12bn NHS computer system is scrapped... and it's all YOUR money that Labour poured down the drain fits into this model pretty well. (Regardless of one's opinion about the Daily Mail.)
One could argue that the Administration's tactic of preventing release of critical design data until after the election, to prevent the opposition from using the true costs as a campaign issue, was sabotage de facto. This put the entire development process several months, perhaps a year, behind schedule.
You _could_ buy us each one, to atone for your sins. :D
It's just vocabulary. In FORTRAN, "DO 100 I = 1,10" where 100 is the line number of the last statement in the loop means the same thing as "for (i=1;i=10;i++) {...} In the card, punch tape, and early 110 baud (10 chars/sec) teleprinter days shorter was very advantageous - the same reason that most of the common unix commands are two letters.
Yes. It's not on the bits & bytes level, but the complexities are fundamentally similar and the answers can be just as, or more, difficult to figure out. And the additional impact can be enormous. I haven't had to actually roll out any cloud based services, but I'm looking at a couple right now for a presently-small-but-hopefully-larger business. Managing the loss of a SaaS vendor (for any reason) is analogous to a NAS or other major data center component blowing up (or preferably getting ready to die, so we can do something in advance) - questions like "where is the data backed up" and "how do we migrate our data to the new server/service" must be answered.
In both cases, in the ideal case all of the possibilities have been explored and contingency plans have been created (and maintained). For instance, it seems to naive me, for example, using cloud products that support the OpenStack standard, and having at least one running test/failover system either in-house or at another vendor's facility, along with other strategies, would minimize the potential impact and provide maximum flexibility. But it's never quite that simple.
Indeed. I signed up for their one month trial streaming service, and literally none of the movies I wanted to watch were available. A few were available on their DVD mailing service but that's not for me.