There's no one single variable that you can point to and blame. The system is far more complex than simply blaming Wall Street, Lawyers or what have you, but to dismiss government as one of those variables is woefully ignorant. Particularly given a government is arguably the most important part of a given state, especially when you consider education, which is certainly a major topic concerning innovation.
I see your point, but I think America's government truly is of the people and by the people. It simply reflects what America's people wants. When the American people wanted a man on the moon, the government made it happen. When the American people wanted to win WWII, it did. When the American people believed government was the problem, government behaved accordingly (mechanism: electorate votes government hating politicians who appoint inept people to government functions for reasons other than good governance which creates problems returning us to the beginning:-))
I am saying Government's negative influence is a symptom. The rise in the stature, power and wealth of lawyers and financiers is a symptom. A symptom of American society's values. A runny nose doesn't cause the cold; the cold causes the runny nose.
While we all like to bag on lawyers and financial types, if their jobs were truly worthless they wouldn't exist. High-powered lawyers are the corporate equivalent of a country's nuclear weapons: you have them so you don't have to use them. Saying that they don't create anything is like saying fire alarms don't create anything. It's true right up until a fire starts. It's harder for me to defend financiers, because it looks to me like they've created an ecosystem for themselves, carving profit out of cash flow, but there's lots of competition for that money so it's hard to justify the claim that they're not creating anything.
Interesting and fair point, but don't we need nuclear weapons because the other guy has them? If we didn't have lawyers, would you need one? I don't think the fire alarm analogy is apt, but the nuclear weapons one is. I wish I could find the article again, but there are several lawyers campaigning for lawyer-less law reform. The idea being that if people dealt directly with each other instead of through lawyers, we'd have better outcomes: socially and financially. So I don't buy the idea we need as much lawyers as we have, and that they are properly compensated. They seem to make themselves necessary, not because the need really existed. I can see your point of view, but I can't agree with it.
For finance, as we discovered with the recent pop, a lot of that wealth was on paper and didn't have even currency behind it. For example, the claim X had $2 billion in assets turned out to be worthless because the value was based on the future cash flow, which was never going to materialize. But at the moment the deal was struck, the finance guy got a bonus based on the percentage. So there was a lot of money being siphoned off, but it wasn't because we were making a lot of things. It turned out that money was coming from the global savings glut flooding into America, and most of that cash went into the financiers pockets while the investors got little to nothing in return. Thus my argument for parasitism.
But overall, I think you made excellent points. It doesn't change my opinion, but I want to make a point to thank commenters who make intelligent points, like yourself, as opposed to the knee-jerk rebuttals I usually get.:-)
I love how you find a way to blame this on Fox News and Glen Beck. Yes, the reason that the US doesn't produce as many innovations is because of a cable news channel and a talk show host.
That says more about you than about what I posted.
(For the reading challenged, like chispito, I blamed it on a whole host of things. I just think Fox & Glen fanned the flames. The fire was already started. The fact he saw Fox/Glen and assumed that was my entire argument shows why America is in decline. Get your reading comprehension up, chispito, and maybe I'll respect you.)
Tyler Cowan wrote an interesting hyopthesis called "The Great Stagnation" (available only as an e-book on Amazon). Basically, there were easy pickings for growth: revolutionary technologies like electricity, lots of land, lots of opportunity. Now, there are no low-hanging fruit to get high growth again. Everyone else is simply playing catch-up.
For America, the problem is that for the last 20 years, being a lawyer or Wall Street-type manager or financial manager was where the money was. Unfortunately, those types don't actually create anything. They are, at best, enablers of the people who do and make things. In most cases, though, they are simply fat parasites on the free market draining our best & brightest into pointless careers making derivatives, etc.
America's decline isn't from government, or even necessarily the Rich and Powerful, but from her people. They've turned their back on getting rich by working hard (understandable because of above) or inventing & discovering things. They've turned their back on learning and education (See for example, TLC's transformation from a science/learning channel to reality TV channel). They've also begun turning their back on science and logic in favor of "gut feelings" (Thanks, Glen Beck and Fox News!).
Unless America opens up its borders again, I'd say: get used to it.
Adobe applies way more DRM than most companies - it's just really easy to get around if you know what you're doing. Like most DRM implementations, it only really hampers the people who have paid for the software. The rest of us spent fifteen seconds sending requests to adobe's activation servers to the void thanks to a couple entries in/etc/hosts.
As an outsider looking in, I noticed Adobe never seemed to put any serious DRM on their software. Computer games put more effort into it than Photoshop ever did. I was always surprised how easy it was to install & use Adobe products with a single serial number used by thousands. I know they did make efforts to stop the distribution, but never as hard-core as Microsoft became with Office. And considering the prices they charged, I figured Adobe would.
Then it occurred to me after working with artists who trained on Adobe products (pirated in some cases), etc. that Adobe's _real_ market for the $1000+ titles are businesses: advertising companies, professional graphic designers, businesses, etc. Going after the hobbyist or the poor artists wasn't their style. And then it clicked: when the artists came to my company, they got the company to buy Adobe products. *THUNK!* The network effect. If they can get more people used to using Adobe and associating certain high-value work with Adobe products, then the more likely they are to push for Adobe at work. And thus more money they can squeeze from businesses who make money.
So to me, allowing a certain low level amount of piracy was always part of Adobe's game.
Among the skeptics is Carnevale, one of the researchers who reported the link between Algebra II and good jobs. He warns against thinking of Algebra II as a cause of students getting good jobs merely because it is correlated with success.
It's a mindless "We gotta do something!" attitude. From what I've read over the years, your early childhood environment (nutrition + parenting + stimulation) plus your parents (educated parents => educated kids, successful parents => successful kids) are the strongest factors for a child doing well in school and life.
For America's school children, the first problem is that a surprising amount of American parents seems almost anti-education, anti-intellectual. The second problem is that a child's neighbourhood and the other kids attending the school also have an effect (which lead to the infamous "busing" experiments of the 1970s).
But I don't know if there are effective methods to transform a neighbourhood and an entire school population into high performers, so I don't know if there is anything any single government or organization can do. I don't know what can be done to change America's parents. This problem, IMHO, has always plagued America, but generous immigration laws and the freedom to rise always compensated for it: America attracted the best & brightest with the opportunity to become rich thus saving the rest of America from itself.
Actual mantle drilling will confirm these rocks. But it hasnt been the highest priority in earth science due to these above-mentioned occurrences.
There is still interest in direct sampling because a) those rocks you mentioned are ancient and may not reflect current conditions in the mantle, and b) there are still debates on just how plastic mantle material is which affects all sorts of modelling.
Yeah, it's hot, but it's not going to go shooting up the borehole. It will plastically deform into the borehole and eventually form an intrusion and probably become granite. The only time you could get a volcanic event is if you hit a mantle plume (as mentioned above by AC). In which case, the lava will freeze when it hits the drilling mud plugging itself back up.
Instead of using adblockers, how about boycotting content that comes with annoying ads? Content owners are people, too, and you're not respecting their wishes when you block ads.
I don't use an ad blocker; just NoScript. But you also missed the point: people resort to these measures because web advertising has become abusive because they desperately want attention.
How often do you see people cutting out ads from a magazine or newspaper because they don't want to look at ads? Even though an Ad Blocker is a lot less work, it still takes some effort to find and install an AdBlocker. People seek them out because they don't want so Javascript ad screaming "HELLO!!?? HELLO!!!??" or opening 5-10 pop behinds.
Understand: people are avoiding ads because they are resorting to abusive measures to get attention.
Boycotting the content: that would be "nice" of the users instead of just blocking the ads. But then again, it would also be "nice" if the advertisers didn't sell my personal info like cigarettes in a prison.
You think your cookies and tracking are harmless, or even good, but as you can see, very powerful backlashes form which will hurt everyone because you abused your privelege, and cross-site cookies tracking is a privelege. I understand the need for advertising tracking to improve the value of the ad to the ad buyer and to me, the ad "consumer". But considering it's becoming a hodge-podge and used to make people very uncomfortable, there was an inevitible push back.
You lost the Javascript/flash wars because you allowed abusive banner ads. Sure, you got a quick hit for a year or two, but for how long until AdBlocker has become de rigeur for the heavy Internet browser? So by trying to be too flashy and too in your face, you lost all right to use Javascript/flash for your ads.
Now you are losing the cookie battle too.
Just try not to be evil and respect people's wishes. Is it really that hard? Really?
Android, iPhone, LINUX (may have started out in Europe, but it seems like most of the code contribution is US), SpaceX, etc.
If we are talking innovation, that has more to do with freedom to create and the ability to get rich doing it. The West, and America, still is the best place for doing that. China may MAKE the iPhone, but they didn't design it. Innovation is creating the new things people want and being able to martial the capital and talent from a global pool to make that happen. America still has that in s---loads compared to the rest of the world, and especially China.
Articles like this seems like engineers wishing they were as valued as lawyers and MBAs. While noble, it has little bearing on innovation. A lawyer and MBA can be taught why an innovation is important and they can support it. Teaching an engineer how to be charismastic and to lead people takes longer.
Having said all that, the creeping corporatism that is once again retaking American government will undo that--again. The second handers are gaining more and more power. Aided & abetted, ironically, by Ayn Rand followers like Ron Paul. For example, net neutrality is about making sure the conditions that allowed competition to happen on an even playing field to identify the true innovators like Google. Now, if the entrenched money can buy better access, you can be damn sure they will use that money to buy poorer access for new start-ups. That's how innovation gets stifled: not a lack of engineers, but confusing whats-good-for-corporations with freedom.
I said this happened before. Several times in fact. Each time, there was a "sputnik" moment that woke America up and shook things up. The last example I can think of is the automative industry in the 1970s. The big three had used their power to effectively shut out American start-ups and reduce the market to four players: themselves and AMC. They spent their R&D on styling & marketing rather than fuel economy and innovation. Thus the only innovation came from OUTSIDE the United States, and after the shot across their bow in the 1973 oil shock, they were still in denial and the Federal government had to kick them in the butt with CAFE to even get them thinking about real engineering innovation. Then the 1979 oil shock was the sputnik moment when foreign car companies and their innovation began to eclipse them.
Supporting corporations over freedom to innovate is the real problem. Not so much the lack of respect of engineers and scientists, IMHO.
It's been a while since I even thought about this, but I thought (at least in Canada), you could simply write to the publisher and get an educational exemption for reproducing lyrics. My elementary school choir had to do this.
School bands aren't affected by this because when I was in band (Oblig: "this one time, at band camp...") we each had to buy our own copy of the music book. The few times we had copies, the band teacher did have to get permission from the publisher or she bought the special "band" edition of the book which included the right to make copies.
But going after kindegardeners... Where's Chris Hanson where you need them?
Chris Hanson: "So, RIAA, what brings you here today?" RIAA: "Um... To collect royalties from 5 year olds..."
Front-page: America & England discuss the problems in "Indochina". That's Viet Nam to you younglings.
Also: a report on the status of the Comet disaster investigation which would lead to major changes in aviation and introduce us to the safe age of jet travel. When metal fatigue became an everyday part of the aeronautical engineer's lexicon...
It may have been event-less, but the bubbling of bigger things are quite apparent.
Which is why talk of geoengineering with aerosols are treated with hand-wringing by real scientists. Particulates and aerosols behave differently at different altitudes, times of the year & day, etc. You can't just set up a company and say, "I'll shoot salt water up in the air!" or "I'll eject sulfur particulates high up!" and think you've solved anything, let alone global warming.:-)
Never seen them (vendor engineers). Seriously. Where did you work where they would talk to you?
There are medium to smallish companies we buy software from, and they have sent their engineers to observe & talk to us. But none of the big boys have ever sent any engineer to us.
Amusing. I work for a large utility up here in Canadia, supposedly one of the top 3 purchasers of Oracle & SAP in my province, and we've only seen the sales reps walking around, usually cracking down on not-enough-licenses issues.
Talk to them about an issue or feature you need, and it becomes a chorus of NO's followed by sales people trying to convince us Package X does all that (it doesn't) for a low, low price of Y (it isn't low, and it's always more than Y when the bill comes).
More accurately space SF. I dunno, but somehow the idea of a standardized docking port makes space travel feel more routine part of every day--which it should be.
Forget that, they ran on a platform of transparency. Hell, one of their primary talking points was that the Liberals were corrupt and secretive. And then we see this bullshit. Gotta love the hypocrisy...
This single fact alone is what prevents me from voting Tory. The Liberals are idiots and corrupt, but they weren't very good at hiding it. This government goes to extreme lengths to control the message, and that sets of alarm klaxons in my political senses.
Slashdot Mirror
I see your point, but I think America's government truly is of the people and by the people. It simply reflects what America's people wants. When the American people wanted a man on the moon, the government made it happen. When the American people wanted to win WWII, it did. When the American people believed government was the problem, government behaved accordingly (mechanism: electorate votes government hating politicians who appoint inept people to government functions for reasons other than good governance which creates problems returning us to the beginning :-))
I am saying Government's negative influence is a symptom. The rise in the stature, power and wealth of lawyers and financiers is a symptom. A symptom of American society's values. A runny nose doesn't cause the cold; the cold causes the runny nose.
While we all like to bag on lawyers and financial types, if their jobs were truly worthless they wouldn't exist. High-powered lawyers are the corporate equivalent of a country's nuclear weapons: you have them so you don't have to use them. Saying that they don't create anything is like saying fire alarms don't create anything. It's true right up until a fire starts. It's harder for me to defend financiers, because it looks to me like they've created an ecosystem for themselves, carving profit out of cash flow, but there's lots of competition for that money so it's hard to justify the claim that they're not creating anything.
Interesting and fair point, but don't we need nuclear weapons because the other guy has them? If we didn't have lawyers, would you need one? I don't think the fire alarm analogy is apt, but the nuclear weapons one is. I wish I could find the article again, but there are several lawyers campaigning for lawyer-less law reform. The idea being that if people dealt directly with each other instead of through lawyers, we'd have better outcomes: socially and financially. So I don't buy the idea we need as much lawyers as we have, and that they are properly compensated. They seem to make themselves necessary, not because the need really existed. I can see your point of view, but I can't agree with it.
For finance, as we discovered with the recent pop, a lot of that wealth was on paper and didn't have even currency behind it. For example, the claim X had $2 billion in assets turned out to be worthless because the value was based on the future cash flow, which was never going to materialize. But at the moment the deal was struck, the finance guy got a bonus based on the percentage. So there was a lot of money being siphoned off, but it wasn't because we were making a lot of things. It turned out that money was coming from the global savings glut flooding into America, and most of that cash went into the financiers pockets while the investors got little to nothing in return. Thus my argument for parasitism.
But overall, I think you made excellent points. It doesn't change my opinion, but I want to make a point to thank commenters who make intelligent points, like yourself, as opposed to the knee-jerk rebuttals I usually get. :-)
I love how you find a way to blame this on Fox News and Glen Beck. Yes, the reason that the US doesn't produce as many innovations is because of a cable news channel and a talk show host.
That says more about you than about what I posted.
(For the reading challenged, like chispito, I blamed it on a whole host of things. I just think Fox & Glen fanned the flames. The fire was already started. The fact he saw Fox/Glen and assumed that was my entire argument shows why America is in decline. Get your reading comprehension up, chispito, and maybe I'll respect you.)
Tyler Cowan wrote an interesting hyopthesis called "The Great Stagnation" (available only as an e-book on Amazon). Basically, there were easy pickings for growth: revolutionary technologies like electricity, lots of land, lots of opportunity. Now, there are no low-hanging fruit to get high growth again. Everyone else is simply playing catch-up.
For America, the problem is that for the last 20 years, being a lawyer or Wall Street-type manager or financial manager was where the money was. Unfortunately, those types don't actually create anything. They are, at best, enablers of the people who do and make things. In most cases, though, they are simply fat parasites on the free market draining our best & brightest into pointless careers making derivatives, etc.
America's decline isn't from government, or even necessarily the Rich and Powerful, but from her people. They've turned their back on getting rich by working hard (understandable because of above) or inventing & discovering things. They've turned their back on learning and education (See for example, TLC's transformation from a science/learning channel to reality TV channel). They've also begun turning their back on science and logic in favor of "gut feelings" (Thanks, Glen Beck and Fox News!).
Unless America opens up its borders again, I'd say: get used to it.
Adobe applies way more DRM than most companies - it's just really easy to get around if you know what you're doing. Like most DRM implementations, it only really hampers the people who have paid for the software. The rest of us spent fifteen seconds sending requests to adobe's activation servers to the void thanks to a couple entries in /etc/hosts.
And you've disproved my point... how? :-)
As an outsider looking in, I noticed Adobe never seemed to put any serious DRM on their software. Computer games put more effort into it than Photoshop ever did. I was always surprised how easy it was to install & use Adobe products with a single serial number used by thousands. I know they did make efforts to stop the distribution, but never as hard-core as Microsoft became with Office. And considering the prices they charged, I figured Adobe would.
Then it occurred to me after working with artists who trained on Adobe products (pirated in some cases), etc. that Adobe's _real_ market for the $1000+ titles are businesses: advertising companies, professional graphic designers, businesses, etc. Going after the hobbyist or the poor artists wasn't their style. And then it clicked: when the artists came to my company, they got the company to buy Adobe products. *THUNK!* The network effect. If they can get more people used to using Adobe and associating certain high-value work with Adobe products, then the more likely they are to push for Adobe at work. And thus more money they can squeeze from businesses who make money.
So to me, allowing a certain low level amount of piracy was always part of Adobe's game.
One of the study's authors actually says that:
It's a mindless "We gotta do something!" attitude. From what I've read over the years, your early childhood environment (nutrition + parenting + stimulation) plus your parents (educated parents => educated kids, successful parents => successful kids) are the strongest factors for a child doing well in school and life.
For America's school children, the first problem is that a surprising amount of American parents seems almost anti-education, anti-intellectual. The second problem is that a child's neighbourhood and the other kids attending the school also have an effect (which lead to the infamous "busing" experiments of the 1970s).
But I don't know if there are effective methods to transform a neighbourhood and an entire school population into high performers, so I don't know if there is anything any single government or organization can do. I don't know what can be done to change America's parents. This problem, IMHO, has always plagued America, but generous immigration laws and the freedom to rise always compensated for it: America attracted the best & brightest with the opportunity to become rich thus saving the rest of America from itself.
I humbly accept your correction. :-) Would mantle become basalt if quickly cooled?
Actual mantle drilling will confirm these rocks. But it hasnt been the highest priority in earth science due to these above-mentioned occurrences.
There is still interest in direct sampling because a) those rocks you mentioned are ancient and may not reflect current conditions in the mantle, and b) there are still debates on just how plastic mantle material is which affects all sorts of modelling.
Yeah, it's hot, but it's not going to go shooting up the borehole. It will plastically deform into the borehole and eventually form an intrusion and probably become granite. The only time you could get a volcanic event is if you hit a mantle plume (as mentioned above by AC). In which case, the lava will freeze when it hits the drilling mud plugging itself back up.
DRAAAAAAIIINAGE,YOU BOY!
Instead of using adblockers, how about boycotting content that comes with annoying ads? Content owners are people, too, and you're not respecting their wishes when you block ads.
I don't use an ad blocker; just NoScript. But you also missed the point: people resort to these measures because web advertising has become abusive because they desperately want attention.
How often do you see people cutting out ads from a magazine or newspaper because they don't want to look at ads? Even though an Ad Blocker is a lot less work, it still takes some effort to find and install an AdBlocker. People seek them out because they don't want so Javascript ad screaming "HELLO!!?? HELLO!!!??" or opening 5-10 pop behinds.
Understand: people are avoiding ads because they are resorting to abusive measures to get attention.
Boycotting the content: that would be "nice" of the users instead of just blocking the ads. But then again, it would also be "nice" if the advertisers didn't sell my personal info like cigarettes in a prison.
You think your cookies and tracking are harmless, or even good, but as you can see, very powerful backlashes form which will hurt everyone because you abused your privelege, and cross-site cookies tracking is a privelege. I understand the need for advertising tracking to improve the value of the ad to the ad buyer and to me, the ad "consumer". But considering it's becoming a hodge-podge and used to make people very uncomfortable, there was an inevitible push back.
You lost the Javascript/flash wars because you allowed abusive banner ads. Sure, you got a quick hit for a year or two, but for how long until AdBlocker has become de rigeur for the heavy Internet browser? So by trying to be too flashy and too in your face, you lost all right to use Javascript/flash for your ads.
Now you are losing the cookie battle too.
Just try not to be evil and respect people's wishes. Is it really that hard? Really?
Android, iPhone, LINUX (may have started out in Europe, but it seems like most of the code contribution is US), SpaceX, etc.
If we are talking innovation, that has more to do with freedom to create and the ability to get rich doing it. The West, and America, still is the best place for doing that. China may MAKE the iPhone, but they didn't design it. Innovation is creating the new things people want and being able to martial the capital and talent from a global pool to make that happen. America still has that in s---loads compared to the rest of the world, and especially China.
Articles like this seems like engineers wishing they were as valued as lawyers and MBAs. While noble, it has little bearing on innovation. A lawyer and MBA can be taught why an innovation is important and they can support it. Teaching an engineer how to be charismastic and to lead people takes longer.
Having said all that, the creeping corporatism that is once again retaking American government will undo that--again. The second handers are gaining more and more power. Aided & abetted, ironically, by Ayn Rand followers like Ron Paul. For example, net neutrality is about making sure the conditions that allowed competition to happen on an even playing field to identify the true innovators like Google. Now, if the entrenched money can buy better access, you can be damn sure they will use that money to buy poorer access for new start-ups. That's how innovation gets stifled: not a lack of engineers, but confusing whats-good-for-corporations with freedom.
I said this happened before. Several times in fact. Each time, there was a "sputnik" moment that woke America up and shook things up. The last example I can think of is the automative industry in the 1970s. The big three had used their power to effectively shut out American start-ups and reduce the market to four players: themselves and AMC. They spent their R&D on styling & marketing rather than fuel economy and innovation. Thus the only innovation came from OUTSIDE the United States, and after the shot across their bow in the 1973 oil shock, they were still in denial and the Federal government had to kick them in the butt with CAFE to even get them thinking about real engineering innovation. Then the 1979 oil shock was the sputnik moment when foreign car companies and their innovation began to eclipse them.
Supporting corporations over freedom to innovate is the real problem. Not so much the lack of respect of engineers and scientists, IMHO.
"Land shark!"
The Land shark sketch
Krugman merely quoted it, even citing KFM's blog post.
It's been a while since I even thought about this, but I thought (at least in Canada), you could simply write to the publisher and get an educational exemption for reproducing lyrics. My elementary school choir had to do this.
School bands aren't affected by this because when I was in band (Oblig: "this one time, at band camp...") we each had to buy our own copy of the music book. The few times we had copies, the band teacher did have to get permission from the publisher or she bought the special "band" edition of the book which included the right to make copies.
But going after kindegardeners... Where's Chris Hanson where you need them?
Chris Hanson: "So, RIAA, what brings you here today?"
RIAA: "Um... To collect royalties from 5 year olds..."
Front-page: America & England discuss the problems in "Indochina". That's Viet Nam to you younglings.
Also: a report on the status of the Comet disaster investigation which would lead to major changes in aviation and introduce us to the safe age of jet travel. When metal fatigue became an everyday part of the aeronautical engineer's lexicon...
It may have been event-less, but the bubbling of bigger things are quite apparent.
Which is why talk of geoengineering with aerosols are treated with hand-wringing by real scientists. Particulates and aerosols behave differently at different altitudes, times of the year & day, etc. You can't just set up a company and say, "I'll shoot salt water up in the air!" or "I'll eject sulfur particulates high up!" and think you've solved anything, let alone global warming. :-)
LOL! Good one. :-)
Proximity is entirely the reason you saw them.
Although for the small to mid sized vendors I mentioned, they did fly in and stay for a few weeks.
Never seen them (vendor engineers). Seriously. Where did you work where they would talk to you?
There are medium to smallish companies we buy software from, and they have sent their engineers to observe & talk to us. But none of the big boys have ever sent any engineer to us.
Amusing. I work for a large utility up here in Canadia, supposedly one of the top 3 purchasers of Oracle & SAP in my province, and we've only seen the sales reps walking around, usually cracking down on not-enough-licenses issues.
Talk to them about an issue or feature you need, and it becomes a chorus of NO's followed by sales people trying to convince us Package X does all that (it doesn't) for a low, low price of Y (it isn't low, and it's always more than Y when the bill comes).
More accurately space SF. I dunno, but somehow the idea of a standardized docking port makes space travel feel more routine part of every day--which it should be.
Mod parent up. :-)
This single fact alone is what prevents me from voting Tory. The Liberals are idiots and corrupt, but they weren't very good at hiding it. This government goes to extreme lengths to control the message, and that sets of alarm klaxons in my political senses.