How is that different from being... a doctor, a fireman, a nuclear plant operator, a plumber, or an electrical line repairman?
Welcome to the world of essential services. When your job is to keep things working, you don't get to pick your hours cause shit happens.
Most admins don't provide any essential services. The systems most of them are responsible for keeping running do not run the equipment at any hospital, fire station, nuclear power plant, or other service in which people will be injured/killed if it does not function properly. Some people really need to get a grip...
Picking your boss. If you're not up a creek looking for work, that interview is to let you meet your managers, talk to some workers about the managers.
When I started working it was "If I can just get in the door"
When I was in my 20's it was "What cool things will this job do for me"
Now That i'm in my 30's its "Will I be able to work with these people"
Now that I'm in my 40's, it's "fuck that, I work for no one." I like being my own boss. I'm a lousy boss, though. You would not believe what I let myself get away with on the job...
Reminds me of a good friend and database analyst who lost her job at an insurance company after a couple decades of work there because they decided to outsource the job to IBM. A week later, she was back doing the exact same job, but as an IBM employee getting paid much more for the exact same job.
No. They're just developers. They're not stressed as much because they don't have to carry a production pager or respond when their code blows up in the wee hours of the night.
That depends on the developer... I've gotten midnight calls before. Granted, my boss was insane. He'd call me in the middle of the night to discuss an idea he just had to discuss for the project... I compiled sufficient evidence to support the theory that the man does not, in fact, sleep. At all, ever. I've seen him during daylight, though, even in direct sunlight, and he seemed perfectly okay with it (unlike me, I sunburn in approximately 15 seconds). He got annoyed when I stopped answering the phone in the middle of the night. "What if it's an emergency?", he asked. I told him if it was an emergency, call 911. I'm incapable of handling emergencies, I can only fix bugs and computer problems, and since our computers aren't running life support equipment, my software can all blow up, crash, and cause the servers to explode, but unless someone is in the room and severely injured by the explosion, this does not constitute an emergency, and if that does happen, I'm the last person you want trying to perform life-saving surgery to remove shrapnel.
Indeed. And it is absolutely no surprise that a fast mirror operation does not do a full consistency and data check. The most you can expect is a check whether data was copied correctly, and even for that you should check the documentation to make sure.
Also, not knowing that backups are both mandatory and not somehow "automagically" done is basic IT operations knowledge. These people did not bother to find out and now blame git, when it is only their own lack of skill they have to blame.
Knowing that screw-ups happen is basic engineering knowledge. Competent engineers design fault-tolerant systems that don't fail spectacularly even when someone screws up. Yes, we understand, these people screwed up badly and are primarily to blame for the problem. This does not absolve git of any poor engineering decisions made that exacerbated the problem. A bad engineer says, "Ah, that person is to blame for causing this problem" and washes his or her hands of it. A good one says, "Ah, that person screwed up monumentally! Is there some way my tool could be improved to prevent screw-ups like that from resulting in a disaster?" You can't prevent all problems, but you shouldn't even be an engineer, software or otherwise, if you're the kind of person who doesn't even try. "Working as documented" is the poor engineer's excuse...
Stop blaming the tool. This is correct and documented behavior. Start blaming the people that messed up badly.
This is a false dilemma. One can certainly blame the blameworthy behaviors of the people using the tool, while still pointing out that the tool itself could be improved. Yes, there are reasons why you might want a mirror operation to be as fast as possible, and even reasons why you might want to mirror a corrupted archive. There should be a flag for that, --skip-integrity-check or the like. Making that the default behavior, however, seems ill-advised.
If they had bothered to look at the documentation they would have known.
Yes, and they should have, and are to blame for not doing so. That said, documenting poor design doesn't make it good design.
Nothing controversial is obvious. If it was obvious, it wouldn't be controversial. If you think it's obvious, you've overlooking something. That certainty that an answer is obvious is, almost always, a sign of ignorance. Any time you find yourself wanting to use the word "obvious", you should quickly recognize that you don't fully understand the problem, and there are factors you're not considering. Continuing to press on makes you look stupid to the people who are aware of those factors and see you're not taking them into account.
The main reason 90% of people appear to be "fundamentally stupid" to someone is that they don't understand what others are thinking, and don't see the alternatives. They're certain of why someone thinks something (and usually wrong), and get downvoted frequently and think they know why (and are wrong about that, too). This is why stupid people usually think they're geniuses. Everyone else looks stupid to them, since others can't see the "obvious" that is plain as day to them.
I would also like to point out that the incompetence and arrogance of the KDE team is quite visible once you investigate a bit of their history.
The opposite is also quite visible if you go looking for that. Any team, being composed of many individuals, is going to display a large variety of traits. There's hardly an assertion you can make about the nature of a team that you can't go dig up plenty of evidence for if you wish to. Like the best pseudo-scientific theories, evidence for them is always plentiful. Their problem lies not at all in a lack of evidence.
As a non-USAian, can someone explain to me how this compares with mail order? Surely any issues concerning out-of-state sales taxes must have been resolved decades ago for mail-order companies? Does using a web site instead of a printed catalogue raise any new issues of law?
These are not new issues, they just were not pressing issues when the vast majority of commerce was still being done at your local stores and very little was actually purchased by mail order from catalogs, so the issues were not really resolved, just left hanging. The difference now is not due to the technology but due to the scale. When you could mail orders books from anywhere, but everyone still went to the local bookstore anyway, it didn't matter. Now that the local bookstores have all gone out of business and everyone is ordering from Amazon.com, it's an issue...
I'm torn. On the one hand, sales tax is regressive (partially offset by exempting food and clothing in my state, but it's still regressive). On the other hand, discouraging excessive consumption (or at least making those who do pay for it) isn't necessarily a bad thing, and to the degree excessive consumption is hurting our environment, the fault for that lies very squarely on the middle-class lifestyle (not that the rich don't contribute, they just don't do so in proportion to their incomes, not to mention there aren't that many of them). But on the third (gripping?) hand, that's better handled with specifically targeted taxes (e.g. a carbon tax) than with a general consumption tax (i.e. sales tax).
How can states enforce this against sellers with no financial interest in the state? If the out of state seller doesn't pay, what recourse is there?
They can take them to court. States sue companies all the time, quite often out-of-state companies. Your state probably has an attorney general who's every bit as busy as mine. The courts have a variety of means of imposing penalties. Usually they are required to pay what they owe, plus fines as well. If they then try to evade that, now there's all kind of nasty things you can do to them for evading court ordered payment, and at that point they have the local and/or federal government after them and can't just ignore the out-of-state government...
I mean, what resource is being consumed by your external purchase?
Entirely irrelevant question. The question is, what resources are being consumed by the residents of the state? Take a look at your state's entire budget for the answer. The next question is, how do you pay for all of that? Only a few of those items are directly and entirely supported by specific use taxes, the rest must be paid for out of general funds, using whatever variety of taxation methods they have decided to use in that state, in whatever proportions they've agreed upon using their representative democracy. If they've decided X percent of that funding is to come from sales tax, then that's where it comes from. Why should anyone be exempted from paying the same share as everyone else (most people would call that "their fair share" but you seem to be allergic to the word "fair" for some reason)?
Yep, the bible is interpreted exactly the same as it was 2000 years ago.
Sure except for the fact that significant portions have been altered, re-translated, or just plain re-written. A perfect example would be the King James version that the purists consider a standard. Or maybe the fact that many of the books of the bible appear to have been written by the same person, well after the dates implied in the writings.
Re-written?! Half of it hadn't been written for the first time 2000 years ago. For that matter, much of the last half deals with events that hadn't happened yet 2000 years ago. Unless I'm very confused, it's currently 2013AD, so 2000 years ago which would be 13AD, well before the governorship of Pontius Pilate (26-36AD).
I have a friend who lives in the Philippines. I considered moving there myself. Convinced myself during a Minnesota winter that it'd be a good idea. Then in the heat and humidity of the next Minnesota summer that I could barely stand, I realized moving to the Philippines would be a monumentally bad idea. What I need is a good cheap nation with a climate same as or cooler than Minnesota. Seriously, I don't know how people can live in those hot nations. You can always add more layers in the winter, but even in a clothing-optional nation (if any exist) there's only so far you can go in the summer. Cold is much easier to deal with than heat...
Wonder what the cost of living is like in Iceland these days...
Meh, I eventually decided if I was just smart about it, I can live cheap in the US...
This is hardly unique to Alaska. Many nations require that when corporations are allowed to extract natural resources from the Commons, they owe at least a percentage of the take to the public. It'd be mind-bogglingly stupid to allow people to take gold/oil/whatever from your land, even if they do all the work, without asking for at least a percentage of the profit, given it was your gold/oil/whatever before you let them take it. Alas, the US federal government is just that stupid... but at least the Alaska state government isn't.
Any country where insulting the leader is illegal should be absolutely off the list for any freedom loving individual.
But it's great living in a country where insulting politicians is kosher but you could be sent to federal prison for telling people about the nifty uses of a prime number?
Wow. I honestly didn't think people this ignorant still existed... do you still believe the world is flat, too?
For the record, there never has and never will be races that exist as "genetically distinct units". Humans have always been too mobile, even in prehistoric times, and genetic studies have shown how genetic adaptions have moved around the world, crossing genetic "barriers" as they move through regions where "races" mix as if race didn't really even exist as a physical fact. The reason for that is, it doesn't, and never did. To the extent races exist at all, the dividing line between them is an arbitrary, human-defined line, not a physical or biological thing. It's like the line between the US and Canada -- you have to examine the laws to find it, no examination of a patch of forest that it runs through will reveal where it lies unless someone earlier came by and put up a signpost. It's a social construct, not a natural one. If you know enough about the commonly found genetics in two nations, you can get a genetic sample from two individuals and make a good guess about which one came from which nation, but it'd be a probabilistic thing, as there's no sharp divide between so-called races, just a continuous genetic gradient.
No kidding. And telling your kid "No, sorry it's a security risk" doesn't really help.
Do you tell them that if they ask you to install any other apps, or are you under the delusion that a Java app is a bigger security risk than a native app?
You can be a pauliac and still think deflationary currencies are a bad idea. The true blue ones are investing in gold, not BTC. It has substance.
Hopefully the people doing so understand that gold is a valuable commodity, not a magic metal of pure true value itself made physical. The ones who tend to think the latter are going to be hurting in a very bad way once asteroid mining becomes reality and it becomes clear to everyone that there's more gold at our fingertips than there is copper on Earth, and the price reacts accordingly. Kids born today have a good chance of seeing a world where gold wire is sold in hardware stores for household wiring. Spools of insulated gold wire, 2oz for $1.99...
Yeah, I pulling numbers out of thin air. The basic principle is right, though. Whether it's a good investment today or not depends on short term trends, but it's absolutely certain it's not a good investment in the sufficiently long term.
...too much intellectual bandwidth, funding, and future research proposals go into the search for exoplanets.
Sorry for the double-post, but in my haste I neglected to notice the second and more pernicious fallacy here. There's a school of thought that says if you have problems A, B, C, and D to solve, but you determine problem A is by far the most important, that you should devote all your resources into solving A and ignore B, C, and D until you've solved A. This is an incredibly bad idea for numerous reasons, but principally there's the problem of diminishing returns. The more funding you throw at A, the less you're getting per dollar. Indeed in fields like science, it's by no means certain that you're getting anything at all -- the needed breakthrough may come on the same timetable regardless of how much money you throw at it. In the meanwhile, you make no progress on B, C, and D where even a few dollars would make immense progress. If A is more important, you throw more money at it, but you don't starve all the other problems, you throw money at them too, just less. Looking for objects in the sky isn't a very expensive task relatively speaking. And just in general, the optimal approach for maximizing progress on problems (whether it's research or other kinds of problems) usually involves an "all at once" approach, giving more to the priorities but not starving the others, and particularly in cases where it's not clear spending even more money on A would be at all helpful, whereas spending money on B clearly would be. Scientific problems in particular don't necessarily advance based on amount of money thrown at them.
A third problem here is that what you're asking for is solutions to known unknowns. We tend to prioritize finding answers to questions we already know, but really the most impressive scientific advances come when we discover things we didn't even know enough to know were in question. Thus, much of science should always be devoted to looking for new things, discovering stuff, etc. Sure, all we've found today was a rather uninteresting brown dwarf, but how much would our understanding of the universe have been advanced if we'd found something that we never even had an inkling might be there? At that point, throwing money at solving known issues with theoretical physics would seem truly wasteful compared to what we got just looking at to see what's out there. We look for exoplanets and brown dwarfs and things because as much as we think we know about them, until we look, we don't really know, and we could very well be wrong, and the consequences of what we discover in the process might be far more significant than any research project you can name, indeed depending on what we find, might be more significant than anything we can even currently conceive of.
Slashdot Mirror
How is that different from being... a doctor, a fireman, a nuclear plant operator, a plumber, or an electrical line repairman?
Welcome to the world of essential services. When your job is to keep things working, you don't get to pick your hours cause shit happens.
Most admins don't provide any essential services. The systems most of them are responsible for keeping running do not run the equipment at any hospital, fire station, nuclear power plant, or other service in which people will be injured/killed if it does not function properly. Some people really need to get a grip...
Picking your boss. If you're not up a creek looking for work, that interview is to let you meet your managers, talk to some workers about the managers.
When I started working it was "If I can just get in the door"
When I was in my 20's it was "What cool things will this job do for me"
Now That i'm in my 30's its "Will I be able to work with these people"
Now that I'm in my 40's, it's "fuck that, I work for no one." I like being my own boss. I'm a lousy boss, though. You would not believe what I let myself get away with on the job...
Reminds me of a good friend and database analyst who lost her job at an insurance company after a couple decades of work there because they decided to outsource the job to IBM. A week later, she was back doing the exact same job, but as an IBM employee getting paid much more for the exact same job.
No. They're just developers. They're not stressed as much because they don't have to carry a production pager or respond when their code blows up in the wee hours of the night.
That depends on the developer... I've gotten midnight calls before. Granted, my boss was insane. He'd call me in the middle of the night to discuss an idea he just had to discuss for the project... I compiled sufficient evidence to support the theory that the man does not, in fact, sleep. At all, ever. I've seen him during daylight, though, even in direct sunlight, and he seemed perfectly okay with it (unlike me, I sunburn in approximately 15 seconds). He got annoyed when I stopped answering the phone in the middle of the night. "What if it's an emergency?", he asked. I told him if it was an emergency, call 911. I'm incapable of handling emergencies, I can only fix bugs and computer problems, and since our computers aren't running life support equipment, my software can all blow up, crash, and cause the servers to explode, but unless someone is in the room and severely injured by the explosion, this does not constitute an emergency, and if that does happen, I'm the last person you want trying to perform life-saving surgery to remove shrapnel.
I don't work there anymore...
My commute is 5 minutes, I never see users and I still would not go for that deal.
For $11/hour you can work at McDonalds.
I'd do admin work for that kind of pay, but there's no way you could get me to work at any kind of restaurant for that little... that's real work.
...my brother and his wife (musicians) use "Baby Elephant Walk" since they can vamp that ad eternam.
I think War's "Low Rider" works particularly well for this. All my friends know the Low Rider... ;)
I could get extra evil here by mentioning the Marie Osmond version of the song "Paper Roses", but that would be so wrong to do to people...
Or the Jackson 5's 'ABC'. Damn. Now I have to RTFA so that I can get that one out of my head . . .
I'm quite gratified to have no idea what either of you are talking about. :D Now all I need to do is resist the urge to Google...
Where is the "+1 Evil" mod when I need it...
Indeed. And it is absolutely no surprise that a fast mirror operation does not do a full consistency and data check. The most you can expect is a check whether data was copied correctly, and even for that you should check the documentation to make sure.
Also, not knowing that backups are both mandatory and not somehow "automagically" done is basic IT operations knowledge. These people did not bother to find out and now blame git, when it is only their own lack of skill they have to blame.
Knowing that screw-ups happen is basic engineering knowledge. Competent engineers design fault-tolerant systems that don't fail spectacularly even when someone screws up. Yes, we understand, these people screwed up badly and are primarily to blame for the problem. This does not absolve git of any poor engineering decisions made that exacerbated the problem. A bad engineer says, "Ah, that person is to blame for causing this problem" and washes his or her hands of it. A good one says, "Ah, that person screwed up monumentally! Is there some way my tool could be improved to prevent screw-ups like that from resulting in a disaster?" You can't prevent all problems, but you shouldn't even be an engineer, software or otherwise, if you're the kind of person who doesn't even try. "Working as documented" is the poor engineer's excuse...
Stop blaming the tool. This is correct and documented behavior. Start blaming the people that messed up badly.
This is a false dilemma. One can certainly blame the blameworthy behaviors of the people using the tool, while still pointing out that the tool itself could be improved. Yes, there are reasons why you might want a mirror operation to be as fast as possible, and even reasons why you might want to mirror a corrupted archive. There should be a flag for that, --skip-integrity-check or the like. Making that the default behavior, however, seems ill-advised.
If they had bothered to look at the documentation they would have known.
Yes, and they should have, and are to blame for not doing so. That said, documenting poor design doesn't make it good design.
Nothing controversial is obvious. If it was obvious, it wouldn't be controversial. If you think it's obvious, you've overlooking something. That certainty that an answer is obvious is, almost always, a sign of ignorance. Any time you find yourself wanting to use the word "obvious", you should quickly recognize that you don't fully understand the problem, and there are factors you're not considering. Continuing to press on makes you look stupid to the people who are aware of those factors and see you're not taking them into account.
The main reason 90% of people appear to be "fundamentally stupid" to someone is that they don't understand what others are thinking, and don't see the alternatives. They're certain of why someone thinks something (and usually wrong), and get downvoted frequently and think they know why (and are wrong about that, too). This is why stupid people usually think they're geniuses. Everyone else looks stupid to them, since others can't see the "obvious" that is plain as day to them.
I would also like to point out that the incompetence and arrogance of the KDE team is quite visible once you investigate a bit of their history.
The opposite is also quite visible if you go looking for that. Any team, being composed of many individuals, is going to display a large variety of traits. There's hardly an assertion you can make about the nature of a team that you can't go dig up plenty of evidence for if you wish to. Like the best pseudo-scientific theories, evidence for them is always plentiful. Their problem lies not at all in a lack of evidence.
As a non-USAian, can someone explain to me how this compares with mail order? Surely any issues concerning out-of-state sales taxes must have been resolved decades ago for mail-order companies? Does using a web site instead of a printed catalogue raise any new issues of law?
These are not new issues, they just were not pressing issues when the vast majority of commerce was still being done at your local stores and very little was actually purchased by mail order from catalogs, so the issues were not really resolved, just left hanging. The difference now is not due to the technology but due to the scale. When you could mail orders books from anywhere, but everyone still went to the local bookstore anyway, it didn't matter. Now that the local bookstores have all gone out of business and everyone is ordering from Amazon.com, it's an issue...
I'm torn. On the one hand, sales tax is regressive (partially offset by exempting food and clothing in my state, but it's still regressive). On the other hand, discouraging excessive consumption (or at least making those who do pay for it) isn't necessarily a bad thing, and to the degree excessive consumption is hurting our environment, the fault for that lies very squarely on the middle-class lifestyle (not that the rich don't contribute, they just don't do so in proportion to their incomes, not to mention there aren't that many of them). But on the third (gripping?) hand, that's better handled with specifically targeted taxes (e.g. a carbon tax) than with a general consumption tax (i.e. sales tax).
How can states enforce this against sellers with no financial interest in the state? If the out of state seller doesn't pay, what recourse is there?
They can take them to court. States sue companies all the time, quite often out-of-state companies. Your state probably has an attorney general who's every bit as busy as mine. The courts have a variety of means of imposing penalties. Usually they are required to pay what they owe, plus fines as well. If they then try to evade that, now there's all kind of nasty things you can do to them for evading court ordered payment, and at that point they have the local and/or federal government after them and can't just ignore the out-of-state government...
I mean, what resource is being consumed by your external purchase?
Entirely irrelevant question. The question is, what resources are being consumed by the residents of the state? Take a look at your state's entire budget for the answer. The next question is, how do you pay for all of that? Only a few of those items are directly and entirely supported by specific use taxes, the rest must be paid for out of general funds, using whatever variety of taxation methods they have decided to use in that state, in whatever proportions they've agreed upon using their representative democracy. If they've decided X percent of that funding is to come from sales tax, then that's where it comes from. Why should anyone be exempted from paying the same share as everyone else (most people would call that "their fair share" but you seem to be allergic to the word "fair" for some reason)?
Doesn't matter, the audiophile market is not rational (kind of like the wine market).
Show me a rational market, and I'll have to inquire as to the nature and evolutionary history of the species of aliens participating in it.
Yep, the bible is interpreted exactly the same as it was 2000 years ago.
Sure except for the fact that significant portions have been altered, re-translated, or just plain re-written. A perfect example would be the King James version that the purists consider a standard. Or maybe the fact that many of the books of the bible appear to have been written by the same person, well after the dates implied in the writings.
Re-written?! Half of it hadn't been written for the first time 2000 years ago. For that matter, much of the last half deals with events that hadn't happened yet 2000 years ago. Unless I'm very confused, it's currently 2013AD, so 2000 years ago which would be 13AD, well before the governorship of Pontius Pilate (26-36AD).
I have a friend who lives in the Philippines. I considered moving there myself. Convinced myself during a Minnesota winter that it'd be a good idea. Then in the heat and humidity of the next Minnesota summer that I could barely stand, I realized moving to the Philippines would be a monumentally bad idea. What I need is a good cheap nation with a climate same as or cooler than Minnesota. Seriously, I don't know how people can live in those hot nations. You can always add more layers in the winter, but even in a clothing-optional nation (if any exist) there's only so far you can go in the summer. Cold is much easier to deal with than heat...
Wonder what the cost of living is like in Iceland these days...
Meh, I eventually decided if I was just smart about it, I can live cheap in the US...
Is there some reason you copy-pasted PopeRatzo's post? Trying to farm karma or something?
This is hardly unique to Alaska. Many nations require that when corporations are allowed to extract natural resources from the Commons, they owe at least a percentage of the take to the public. It'd be mind-bogglingly stupid to allow people to take gold/oil/whatever from your land, even if they do all the work, without asking for at least a percentage of the profit, given it was your gold/oil/whatever before you let them take it. Alas, the US federal government is just that stupid... but at least the Alaska state government isn't.
Any country where insulting the leader is illegal should be absolutely off the list for any freedom loving individual.
But it's great living in a country where insulting politicians is kosher but you could be sent to federal prison for telling people about the nifty uses of a prime number?
Wow. I honestly didn't think people this ignorant still existed... do you still believe the world is flat, too?
For the record, there never has and never will be races that exist as "genetically distinct units". Humans have always been too mobile, even in prehistoric times, and genetic studies have shown how genetic adaptions have moved around the world, crossing genetic "barriers" as they move through regions where "races" mix as if race didn't really even exist as a physical fact. The reason for that is, it doesn't, and never did. To the extent races exist at all, the dividing line between them is an arbitrary, human-defined line, not a physical or biological thing. It's like the line between the US and Canada -- you have to examine the laws to find it, no examination of a patch of forest that it runs through will reveal where it lies unless someone earlier came by and put up a signpost. It's a social construct, not a natural one. If you know enough about the commonly found genetics in two nations, you can get a genetic sample from two individuals and make a good guess about which one came from which nation, but it'd be a probabilistic thing, as there's no sharp divide between so-called races, just a continuous genetic gradient.
No kidding. And telling your kid "No, sorry it's a security risk" doesn't really help.
Do you tell them that if they ask you to install any other apps, or are you under the delusion that a Java app is a bigger security risk than a native app?
You can be a pauliac and still think deflationary currencies are a bad idea. The true blue ones are investing in gold, not BTC. It has substance.
Hopefully the people doing so understand that gold is a valuable commodity, not a magic metal of pure true value itself made physical. The ones who tend to think the latter are going to be hurting in a very bad way once asteroid mining becomes reality and it becomes clear to everyone that there's more gold at our fingertips than there is copper on Earth, and the price reacts accordingly. Kids born today have a good chance of seeing a world where gold wire is sold in hardware stores for household wiring. Spools of insulated gold wire, 2oz for $1.99...
Yeah, I pulling numbers out of thin air. The basic principle is right, though. Whether it's a good investment today or not depends on short term trends, but it's absolutely certain it's not a good investment in the sufficiently long term.
...too much intellectual bandwidth, funding, and future research proposals go into the search for exoplanets.
Sorry for the double-post, but in my haste I neglected to notice the second and more pernicious fallacy here. There's a school of thought that says if you have problems A, B, C, and D to solve, but you determine problem A is by far the most important, that you should devote all your resources into solving A and ignore B, C, and D until you've solved A. This is an incredibly bad idea for numerous reasons, but principally there's the problem of diminishing returns. The more funding you throw at A, the less you're getting per dollar. Indeed in fields like science, it's by no means certain that you're getting anything at all -- the needed breakthrough may come on the same timetable regardless of how much money you throw at it. In the meanwhile, you make no progress on B, C, and D where even a few dollars would make immense progress. If A is more important, you throw more money at it, but you don't starve all the other problems, you throw money at them too, just less. Looking for objects in the sky isn't a very expensive task relatively speaking. And just in general, the optimal approach for maximizing progress on problems (whether it's research or other kinds of problems) usually involves an "all at once" approach, giving more to the priorities but not starving the others, and particularly in cases where it's not clear spending even more money on A would be at all helpful, whereas spending money on B clearly would be. Scientific problems in particular don't necessarily advance based on amount of money thrown at them.
A third problem here is that what you're asking for is solutions to known unknowns. We tend to prioritize finding answers to questions we already know, but really the most impressive scientific advances come when we discover things we didn't even know enough to know were in question. Thus, much of science should always be devoted to looking for new things, discovering stuff, etc. Sure, all we've found today was a rather uninteresting brown dwarf, but how much would our understanding of the universe have been advanced if we'd found something that we never even had an inkling might be there? At that point, throwing money at solving known issues with theoretical physics would seem truly wasteful compared to what we got just looking at to see what's out there. We look for exoplanets and brown dwarfs and things because as much as we think we know about them, until we look, we don't really know, and we could very well be wrong, and the consequences of what we discover in the process might be far more significant than any research project you can name, indeed depending on what we find, might be more significant than anything we can even currently conceive of.