I've been living the last few years of doing and believing the exact opposite of anything Krugman says and it's served me very well. Never before has there been someone as consistently wrong on every subject as that guy... Yet this time, he gets something right?
I'm so confused as to how to proceed...
Do not be deceived. Krugman is a Communist. The Market wants this merger and Government is interfering with it.
The Government is anti-Capitalist and should not interfere with the Free Market.
De-regulation along the lines of the power companies? In other words, break apart "generation" and "distribution"......make TV/broadband one entity and then make the lines themselves a different entity. Have the distribution entity charge customers the same rate scale so that other companies can compete on equal footing.
Which I always considered one of the stupidest forms of pseudo-competition ever dreamed up.
You cannot separate out power running over a common conductor. There is no ownership tag on the individual electrons. So the idea that if they are delivered to house "A" they should be billed to a different "generation company" than if they are delivered to the house next door is ludicrous. Particularly since the "last mile" is a single entity just because no one would stand for having 20 different "electric companies" digging up the streets at the same time.
All of these "generators" are getting their product from a common source, which costs the same to produce regardless of the buyer. It's the ultimate commodity. So the only way that the "generators" can distinguish themselves is by either settling for overall lower profits or by accounting tricks. It's a zero-sum game. And the lower-profits crowd are going to lose.
"Competition" in power companies is nothing but a socialist-style make-work program that creates an artificial tier of middlemen who add the cost of their own overheads, but no added value.
Wait a minute, they're complaining that press freedom has dropped because of Manning and Snowden? Who exactly doesn't know about that because as far as I can tell the press ran wild with it. Seems press freedom worked rather well to uncover quite a lot.
If you'll recall, when Snowden's leaks first came out, the US press was making a concerted effort to assassinate his character in lock-step with the US Congress, White House, and other government agencies.
It was only when that failed that he started getting any US press support at all.
Replace the minority of government supported cronies with the corrupt majority of government supported cronies? You're confusing government interventionism with free market either way. The old robber barons weren't private. They were all state appointed/favored, as opposed to their market opponents. Their monopolies and hegemonies were sold as "greater good", same as your pseudo-socialist bullshit always is. I assume you have no problem with rigging free exchange when someone have nothing of worth anyone cares to trade for though too? That'd be parasitism. Using state coercion to fake a real job just to get the freeloader a paycheck doesn't make such a laborer not a parasite. It'd just make you one of those sanctimonious hypocrites mentioned earlier.
Ah yes, the old excuse "The Free Market wasn't Free".
No. It isn't it never was. It's about as likely to happen as a communistic state withering away. Corporations are not abstract entities. They exist because they have been granted a charter from the state. That's where they came from, and that's where they remain. But in any event, very few markets remain free for one very simple reason. To maintain a state of equilibrium, a system must have negative feedback sufficient to negate forces that force it away from the equilibrium. Markets are noted for being exactly the opposite: positive feedback systems. "Nothing Succeeds Like Success". Lacking negative feedback to keep competition on a level playing field, the lucky ones grow, and use their asset advantages to dictate to their suppliers (a la Wal-Mart, which give us the UPC code). They can get wholesale discounts that smaller competitors cannot, expanding their profitability and thus accelerating their asset advantages. Eventually, they grow so big that they buy out the competition or plow it under, leaving only limited alternatives and we call that result a monopoly. At that point there is no Free Market, because they are the market.
You don't need a government to blame for this, though it's true that once you're big enough you can buy favorable treatment from governments. Microsoft didn't achieve its position because the US Government passed laws favoring it - people bought Microsoft because everyone else was buying Microsoft. Originally that was because IBM was licensing Microsoft and people bought IBM because "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
What point is there in arguing for the benefits of a "Free Market" when no such thing exists and isn't likely to? Why not argue the virtues of unicorn breeding instead?
Ok, how does Sotheby's know it's an original? Starry Night has been around for ages, and by the time we have replicators, it'll have been centuries. How do they verify that what they have is the original, and wasn't replaced by a copy at some point? And how do they know for sure that some rogue employee in Sotheby's didn't switch it out for a copy because some asshole wanted it for his private collection? Sotheby's might not be lying, but they themselves have no way to know for sure. Even today, as I think you pointed out before, places like Sotheby's have been fooled by forgeries. When too many cases of this come to light somehow, everyone's going to doubt the authenticity of anything these places sell (Sotheby's can never be rid of rogue employees, or have 100% perfect security systems) and the values will plummet.
It's a chain of trust. And, as you have observed, one broken link is sufficient to destroy it. The people and institutions such as Sotheby's have a considerable amount invested in being (here's that word again) perceived as trustworthy. That's all it is.
I'm sure they'd like to, but how do they know the guy on the street corner who's selling the "Starry Night" original is lying?
Because the people who pay a mint for the original don't buy it from some guy on a street corner. There's a whole industry based around assuring everyone that the copy being purchased is in fact the one and only original. Sotheby's, for example.
And sure, they could all be lying, but that's how economies work, too. Everyone knows who to believe. And if it can be proven that the belief was incorrect, the whole thing collapses. Admittedly a perceived expert can perform tests that will allegedly (but in practice, not always) determine authenticity. Occasionally, a painting's perceived value will skyrocket because a painting thought to be by a student was declared made by the master. Or vice-versa.
It's all just perception. Not intrinsic value, just perception.
Especially when someone else was sanctimoniously robbed to give it to them. Parasitism's generally icky. Sanctimony from hypocrites too.
That knife cuts both ways. Many of the old robber barons sanctimoniously declared that the people wanted to "rob" them because they demanded something more than starvation wages, excessive working hours or unsafe working conditions.
Because in labor, the "Free" market often means that the people with the money are free to sit on it while the people who provide the labor are free to starve.
Well good then that the ini files for SystemD is text and that you can export the textlogs from the logger.
Exporting isn't the same as processing in place. And the other day, in fact, I ran into an issue where messages that I expect to be able to "tail" out of the older log simply couldn't be found.
The systemd authors have already admitted that there are certain functions that the older script-based ini's could provide that their strictly-declarative system at present cannot. Having text formatted files is useful but not being excessively restricted in what the text can do is also important.
We've got plenty of ludicrously rigid hardcoded traits, it's just hard to see them as such - having been born and raised here.
One of them, ironically, is how much we hate to see others given stuff that they didn't "work" for.
I think it's more backwards, along the lines of "I never had it so easy, why should anyone else?" Can't people see that their life sucked, and making other people's lives suck equally, while "fair", isn't something to strive for.
And yet "working" for things is overrated. Nobody "works" to make the sun shine. Nobody works to keep the air from freezing solid on the ground. Nobody works to ensure that there are 24 hours in a day. Many of the most critical resources we all take for granted are given to the lowliest deadbeat as freely as to the most diligent laborer. What we really have is people getting all resentful over the lesser things while discounting all of the greater ones that they didn't "earn" any more than anyone else did.
I get it. But what I'm saying is that it isn't the inherent properties of original versus copy that give the original the ability to be sold for an obscene amount while relegating the copy to the sale bin. It's the perception that it is the original.
I'm pretty sure that that I've run across cases where sometimes fakes not only were sold based on the perception that they were the original and I think that there have even been cases where the original sold for less than the duplicate.
Perception is everything when it comes to the value of luxuries. Even if I could convince each and every quark in "Starry Night" to undergo mitosis and replicate it all the way down to quantum entanglement, people would still shell out more for the "original".
One of the biggest selling points of Linux for me was that its log and config files were text files.
When I first started working with OS/2, one of my principal frustrations was that each and every IBM program product had its own proprietary config and log file format that could only be accessed using a product-specific utility. In Linux, the standard text utilities were all that were needed, and there are text utilities for almost every conceiveable way to search or update those files.
While there are certain things I like about systemctl and the newer Linux logging manager, their departure from this inherent simplicity disturbs me. It's aking to the trend to provide "improved" systems like Gnome3 or Windows 8 where your gains are offset by your losses.
Even a relatively open binary system like OLE/COM turned out to be more trouble than it was worth for me. I'd rather not throw out the good with the bad.
Re:Cory Doctorow already solved this....
on
Star Trek Economics
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· Score: 1
In his book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom Doctorow describes the post scarcity economy as running on a form of social capital called 'Whuffie'.
Although everyone has their basic needs met their 'reptutation', or opinion's of others adds or subtracts from their Whuffie. They can exchange Whuffie as payment and can earn and lose Whuffie both through direct and indirect means. Shoving through a crowd rudely could result in those that were shoved and witnessed the shoving to lower their opinion of you (even if they don't know you) while those that enjoy a poem you wrote would increase your Whuffie.
This is all made possible by the fact that everyone has a computer implanted in their brain that measures and tracks both the history and current values of everyone's Whuffie.
I always found this to be a clever and more likely shift for capitalist society than going to a Star Trek economy.
Wrong. If both of them look exactly the same, down to the smallest detail, then how exactly do you convince someone to pay millions for one when they can get the other for $10?
The same way we do currently. You can have a perfectly good copy of a van Gogh in your living room (I do, in fact), but only one is the actual one that van Gogh himself sweated over, had standing in his home when he had mental attacks, possibly has hairs from his own cat stuck in the paint and so forth.
Value is often not an absolute, but rather a matter of perception. Nowhere is this more so than in the art world. Even a copy by a notorious forger can sell for much more than a mass-market copy.
How's that an IE vulnerability if it uses Flash as a vector? Are they adding the iFrame in a non-standard way that only IE is susceptible to?
More likely that since (squeaky Ballmer voice at anti-trust hearing) "Internet Explorer is an integral part of Microsoft Windows" that the exploit was able to tunnel out of Flash and into IE (acting as the container) and thence into Windows.
Don't the British punt on a body of water, e.g. punting on the Thames?
El Reg uses the term punters for subscribers or customers paying for a service, like monthly phone bills. Like much of english slang, I have no clue where that came from.
Actually, in its original intent of that use of the word, it meant a gambler. Someone placing a wager or risking a hazard of some sort For example, by sponsoring something). Which probably says something about customer service these days since it now gets used to refer to customers.
It has been suggested that the word is related to "ponder", since wagering is something that hopefully one does only after consideration.
While my parents moved to NC to avoid the winters, they are getting hit hard and in upstate NY we are barely getting a dusting.
That's OK. It's been around 80 in Miami the last few weeks.
No, 80 is NOT normal even in Miami. There's almost a hard border somewhere just north of Daytona where the temperatures have been pretty consistently cold while the southern and central parts of the state are practically breaking out the swimsuits. Go north of that line and you drop 10 degrees before you hit Georgia, and then the temperature REALLY starts to fall.
I'm also in NY. I've lived in Central, Upstate and now Western NY. Without the plows and salt trucks, 90% of the people here wouldn't fare much better than those in Georgia. Why don't they have that equipment? You try explaining to taxpayers that they need to buy and maintain millions of dollars worth of equipment for a scenario that might not happen. It's the same reason we don't have a whole lot of equipment to handle hurricanes or earthquakes here. Sure, it could happen, but it's rare enough that it's not worth the money to put in a whole lot of preparation.
Something nobody seems to be taking into consideration. Most equipment will suffer as much or more from not being used as it will from being used. In Atlanta, a fleet of heavy snow equipment would likely as not be half-deteriorated by the time it was next needed. And it's hard to persuade the taxpayers that you need to pay for all that servicing in normal years winter is simply the season when you switch the A/C off.
No kidding. Here in FL, that would barely have qualified as a rainstorm
I've flown out of town in the feeder band of an oncoming hurricane and in the teeth of a Florida thunderstorm. The hurricane was the less turbulent ride.
I disagree. An old truck of mine died one day on the highway, leaving a toll booth. Completely dead, wouldn't even try and turn over. I had it towed, paid around $500 in diagnostics, parts and labor. A wiring harness came free, was hitting the exhaust manifold, melted the insulation, shorted, blew the fuse to the ECM. When they fixed it, I requested to show me where the problem was. They did. A few weeks later, the problem reoccurred. This time I was able to yank the wires off the manifold, replace the fuse and limp back to the garage. Said something along the lines of "you fixed the symptom, not the cause, make it right", and they did. They re-replaced the damaged wires and properly secured the harness gratis the second time around. I'd wager you'll more likely see this sort of behavior from a small shop, as they typically live and die on reputation and word of mouth. But, I think even chains/large companies have wised up and will strive to do the right thing (might not always happen) because of the ease today versus 20, even 10 years ago of spreading word about your experience.
Treasure these people. They are so rare. I had a local luxury car dealer replace the engine, then the radiator and the ultimate cause of the problem was a crack in the distributor cap. Which should have been one of the first things found, since you have to do something with the distributor just to replace the engine. They also didn't replace all the hoses, so an obscure hose on the bottom failed soon thereafter, causing permanent warpage to the new engine. Needless to say, I don't go there anymore.
The engine replacement, BTW was slightly premature, but not totally unreasonable, as it had quite a few miles and some compression problems. But it probably would have gone a few thousand more if they'd fixed the distributor cap at first.
Too many 'managers' do not understand that debugging and testing take more resources than that required to write the initial lines of code.
When a traditional architect builds a model, it's a scaled-down little thing made of flimsy materials like cardboard and painted sponges. People understand that it takes a lot of work to create the real thing.
When a software architect builds a model, it looks just like the real thing and they think that means that it can go into production next week.
Aren't bugs impossible to avoid in programming, especially in complex projects? There's no such thing as a perfect programmer or perfect code; things can always be fixed, optimized, debugged, and improved. The brick wall analogy simply doesn't apply.
It's worse than that. Writing a program is like writing a contract with the Devil. You'll get exactly what you asked for, not exactly what you wanted.
Very few people have mastered the incredibly subtle art of knowing what to ask for in that much detail. And it really is true that one person's bug may be an incredibly useful feature to another person.
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I've been living the last few years of doing and believing the exact opposite of anything Krugman says and it's served me very well.
Never before has there been someone as consistently wrong on every subject as that guy...
Yet this time, he gets something right?
I'm so confused as to how to proceed...
Do not be deceived. Krugman is a Communist. The Market wants this merger and Government is interfering with it.
The Government is anti-Capitalist and should not interfere with the Free Market.
De-regulation along the lines of the power companies? In other words, break apart "generation" and "distribution"......make TV/broadband one entity and then make the lines themselves a different entity. Have the distribution entity charge customers the same rate scale so that other companies can compete on equal footing.
Which I always considered one of the stupidest forms of pseudo-competition ever dreamed up.
You cannot separate out power running over a common conductor. There is no ownership tag on the individual electrons. So the idea that if they are delivered to house "A" they should be billed to a different "generation company" than if they are delivered to the house next door is ludicrous. Particularly since the "last mile" is a single entity just because no one would stand for having 20 different "electric companies" digging up the streets at the same time.
All of these "generators" are getting their product from a common source, which costs the same to produce regardless of the buyer. It's the ultimate commodity. So the only way that the "generators" can distinguish themselves is by either settling for overall lower profits or by accounting tricks. It's a zero-sum game. And the lower-profits crowd are going to lose.
"Competition" in power companies is nothing but a socialist-style make-work program that creates an artificial tier of middlemen who add the cost of their own overheads, but no added value.
Wait a minute, they're complaining that press freedom has dropped because of Manning and Snowden? Who exactly doesn't know about that because as far as I can tell the press ran wild with it. Seems press freedom worked rather well to uncover quite a lot.
If you'll recall, when Snowden's leaks first came out, the US press was making a concerted effort to assassinate his character in lock-step with the US Congress, White House, and other government agencies.
It was only when that failed that he started getting any US press support at all.
Replace the minority of government supported cronies with the corrupt majority of government supported cronies? You're confusing government interventionism with free market either way. The old robber barons weren't private. They were all state appointed/favored, as opposed to their market opponents. Their monopolies and hegemonies were sold as "greater good", same as your pseudo-socialist bullshit always is. I assume you have no problem with rigging free exchange when someone have nothing of worth anyone cares to trade for though too? That'd be parasitism. Using state coercion to fake a real job just to get the freeloader a paycheck doesn't make such a laborer not a parasite. It'd just make you one of those sanctimonious hypocrites mentioned earlier.
Ah yes, the old excuse "The Free Market wasn't Free".
No. It isn't it never was. It's about as likely to happen as a communistic state withering away. Corporations are not abstract entities. They exist because they have been granted a charter from the state. That's where they came from, and that's where they remain. But in any event, very few markets remain free for one very simple reason. To maintain a state of equilibrium, a system must have negative feedback sufficient to negate forces that force it away from the equilibrium. Markets are noted for being exactly the opposite: positive feedback systems. "Nothing Succeeds Like Success". Lacking negative feedback to keep competition on a level playing field, the lucky ones grow, and use their asset advantages to dictate to their suppliers (a la Wal-Mart, which give us the UPC code). They can get wholesale discounts that smaller competitors cannot, expanding their profitability and thus accelerating their asset advantages. Eventually, they grow so big that they buy out the competition or plow it under, leaving only limited alternatives and we call that result a monopoly. At that point there is no Free Market, because they are the market.
You don't need a government to blame for this, though it's true that once you're big enough you can buy favorable treatment from governments. Microsoft didn't achieve its position because the US Government passed laws favoring it - people bought Microsoft because everyone else was buying Microsoft. Originally that was because IBM was licensing Microsoft and people bought IBM because "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
What point is there in arguing for the benefits of a "Free Market" when no such thing exists and isn't likely to? Why not argue the virtues of unicorn breeding instead?
Ok, how does Sotheby's know it's an original? Starry Night has been around for ages, and by the time we have replicators, it'll have been centuries. How do they verify that what they have is the original, and wasn't replaced by a copy at some point? And how do they know for sure that some rogue employee in Sotheby's didn't switch it out for a copy because some asshole wanted it for his private collection? Sotheby's might not be lying, but they themselves have no way to know for sure. Even today, as I think you pointed out before, places like Sotheby's have been fooled by forgeries. When too many cases of this come to light somehow, everyone's going to doubt the authenticity of anything these places sell (Sotheby's can never be rid of rogue employees, or have 100% perfect security systems) and the values will plummet.
It's a chain of trust. And, as you have observed, one broken link is sufficient to destroy it. The people and institutions such as Sotheby's have a considerable amount invested in being (here's that word again) perceived as trustworthy. That's all it is.
I'm sure they'd like to, but how do they know the guy on the street corner who's selling the "Starry Night" original is lying?
Because the people who pay a mint for the original don't buy it from some guy on a street corner. There's a whole industry based around assuring everyone that the copy being purchased is in fact the one and only original. Sotheby's, for example.
And sure, they could all be lying, but that's how economies work, too. Everyone knows who to believe. And if it can be proven that the belief was incorrect, the whole thing collapses. Admittedly a perceived expert can perform tests that will allegedly (but in practice, not always) determine authenticity. Occasionally, a painting's perceived value will skyrocket because a painting thought to be by a student was declared made by the master. Or vice-versa.
It's all just perception. Not intrinsic value, just perception.
Especially when someone else was sanctimoniously robbed to give it to them. Parasitism's generally icky. Sanctimony from hypocrites too.
That knife cuts both ways. Many of the old robber barons sanctimoniously declared that the people wanted to "rob" them because they demanded something more than starvation wages, excessive working hours or unsafe working conditions.
Because in labor, the "Free" market often means that the people with the money are free to sit on it while the people who provide the labor are free to starve.
Well good then that the ini files for SystemD is text and that you can export the textlogs from the logger.
Exporting isn't the same as processing in place. And the other day, in fact, I ran into an issue where messages that I expect to be able to "tail" out of the older log simply couldn't be found.
The systemd authors have already admitted that there are certain functions that the older script-based ini's could provide that their strictly-declarative system at present cannot. Having text formatted files is useful but not being excessively restricted in what the text can do is also important.
We've got plenty of ludicrously rigid hardcoded traits, it's just hard to see them as such - having been born and raised here.
One of them, ironically, is how much we hate to see others given stuff that they didn't "work" for.
I think it's more backwards, along the lines of "I never had it so easy, why should anyone else?" Can't people see that their life sucked, and making other people's lives suck equally, while "fair", isn't something to strive for.
And yet "working" for things is overrated. Nobody "works" to make the sun shine. Nobody works to keep the air from freezing solid on the ground. Nobody works to ensure that there are 24 hours in a day. Many of the most critical resources we all take for granted are given to the lowliest deadbeat as freely as to the most diligent laborer. What we really have is people getting all resentful over the lesser things while discounting all of the greater ones that they didn't "earn" any more than anyone else did.
I get it. But what I'm saying is that it isn't the inherent properties of original versus copy that give the original the ability to be sold for an obscene amount while relegating the copy to the sale bin. It's the perception that it is the original.
I'm pretty sure that that I've run across cases where sometimes fakes not only were sold based on the perception that they were the original and I think that there have even been cases where the original sold for less than the duplicate.
Perception is everything when it comes to the value of luxuries. Even if I could convince each and every quark in "Starry Night" to undergo mitosis and replicate it all the way down to quantum entanglement, people would still shell out more for the "original".
One of the biggest selling points of Linux for me was that its log and config files were text files.
When I first started working with OS/2, one of my principal frustrations was that each and every IBM program product had its own proprietary config and log file format that could only be accessed using a product-specific utility. In Linux, the standard text utilities were all that were needed, and there are text utilities for almost every conceiveable way to search or update those files.
While there are certain things I like about systemctl and the newer Linux logging manager, their departure from this inherent simplicity disturbs me. It's aking to the trend to provide "improved" systems like Gnome3 or Windows 8 where your gains are offset by your losses.
Even a relatively open binary system like OLE/COM turned out to be more trouble than it was worth for me. I'd rather not throw out the good with the bad.
In his book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom Doctorow describes the post scarcity economy as running on a form of social capital called 'Whuffie'.
Although everyone has their basic needs met their 'reptutation', or opinion's of others adds or subtracts from their Whuffie. They can exchange Whuffie as payment and can earn and lose Whuffie both through direct and indirect means. Shoving through a crowd rudely could result in those that were shoved and witnessed the shoving to lower their opinion of you (even if they don't know you) while those that enjoy a poem you wrote would increase your Whuffie.
This is all made possible by the fact that everyone has a computer implanted in their brain that measures and tracks both the history and current values of everyone's Whuffie.
I always found this to be a clever and more likely shift for capitalist society than going to a Star Trek economy.
He didn't invent such concepts, however. A related real-life sort of "whuffie" is potlatch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
More closely related is the concept of strakh, as described in Jack Vance's classic "The Moon Moth".
Vance was noted for his creativeness in conceptualizing alien value systems.
Wrong. If both of them look exactly the same, down to the smallest detail, then how exactly do you convince someone to pay millions for one when they can get the other for $10?
The same way we do currently. You can have a perfectly good copy of a van Gogh in your living room (I do, in fact), but only one is the actual one that van Gogh himself sweated over, had standing in his home when he had mental attacks, possibly has hairs from his own cat stuck in the paint and so forth.
Value is often not an absolute, but rather a matter of perception. Nowhere is this more so than in the art world. Even a copy by a notorious forger can sell for much more than a mass-market copy.
We've got plenty of ludicrously rigid hardcoded traits, it's just hard to see them as such - having been born and raised here.
One of them, ironically, is how much we hate to see others given stuff that they didn't "work" for.
How's that an IE vulnerability if it uses Flash as a vector? Are they adding the iFrame in a non-standard way that only IE is susceptible to?
More likely that since (squeaky Ballmer voice at anti-trust hearing) "Internet Explorer is an integral part of Microsoft Windows" that the exploit was able to tunnel out of Flash and into IE (acting as the container) and thence into Windows.
Don't the British punt on a body of water, e.g. punting on the Thames?
El Reg uses the term punters for subscribers or customers paying for a service, like monthly phone bills.
Like much of english slang, I have no clue where that came from.
Actually, in its original intent of that use of the word, it meant a gambler. Someone placing a wager or risking a hazard of some sort For example, by sponsoring something). Which probably says something about customer service these days since it now gets used to refer to customers.
It has been suggested that the word is related to "ponder", since wagering is something that hopefully one does only after consideration.
While my parents moved to NC to avoid the winters, they are getting hit hard and in upstate NY we are barely getting a dusting.
That's OK. It's been around 80 in Miami the last few weeks.
No, 80 is NOT normal even in Miami. There's almost a hard border somewhere just north of Daytona where the temperatures have been pretty consistently cold while the southern and central parts of the state are practically breaking out the swimsuits. Go north of that line and you drop 10 degrees before you hit Georgia, and then the temperature REALLY starts to fall.
I'm also in NY. I've lived in Central, Upstate and now Western NY. Without the plows and salt trucks, 90% of the people here wouldn't fare much better than those in Georgia. Why don't they have that equipment? You try explaining to taxpayers that they need to buy and maintain millions of dollars worth of equipment for a scenario that might not happen. It's the same reason we don't have a whole lot of equipment to handle hurricanes or earthquakes here. Sure, it could happen, but it's rare enough that it's not worth the money to put in a whole lot of preparation.
Something nobody seems to be taking into consideration. Most equipment will suffer as much or more from not being used as it will from being used. In Atlanta, a fleet of heavy snow equipment would likely as not be half-deteriorated by the time it was next needed. And it's hard to persuade the taxpayers that you need to pay for all that servicing in normal years winter is simply the season when you switch the A/C off.
No kidding. Here in FL, that would barely have qualified as a rainstorm
I've flown out of town in the feeder band of an oncoming hurricane and in the teeth of a Florida thunderstorm. The hurricane was the less turbulent ride.
God said "Fuck Corvette"
Clearly, this was the work of the devil. He's pure evil, so clearly he has no problem with "downloading" a few cars!
Well, he'd already downloaded some Porsches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
No, they're Republicans in name too.
They don't have D's next to their name.
Fox News watcher?
I disagree. An old truck of mine died one day on the highway, leaving a toll booth. Completely dead, wouldn't even try and turn over. I had it towed, paid around $500 in diagnostics, parts and labor. A wiring harness came free, was hitting the exhaust manifold, melted the insulation, shorted, blew the fuse to the ECM. When they fixed it, I requested to show me where the problem was. They did. A few weeks later, the problem reoccurred. This time I was able to yank the wires off the manifold, replace the fuse and limp back to the garage. Said something along the lines of "you fixed the symptom, not the cause, make it right", and they did. They re-replaced the damaged wires and properly secured the harness gratis the second time around. I'd wager you'll more likely see this sort of behavior from a small shop, as they typically live and die on reputation and word of mouth. But, I think even chains/large companies have wised up and will strive to do the right thing (might not always happen) because of the ease today versus 20, even 10 years ago of spreading word about your experience.
Treasure these people. They are so rare. I had a local luxury car dealer replace the engine, then the radiator and the ultimate cause of the problem was a crack in the distributor cap. Which should have been one of the first things found, since you have to do something with the distributor just to replace the engine. They also didn't replace all the hoses, so an obscure hose on the bottom failed soon thereafter, causing permanent warpage to the new engine. Needless to say, I don't go there anymore.
The engine replacement, BTW was slightly premature, but not totally unreasonable, as it had quite a few miles and some compression problems. But it probably would have gone a few thousand more if they'd fixed the distributor cap at first.
How about a car analogy.
I bring my card into the shop. Mechanic says "needs X", installs new parts, gets paid.
I drive back in. Same problem. Mechanic looks again. Says "needs Y". Installs new parts, gets paid.
No refunds or free rework there, even though it's obvious that the initial diagnosis was faulty. And, alas, sometimes the second diagnosis as well.
Too many 'managers' do not understand that debugging and testing take more resources than that required to write the initial lines of code.
When a traditional architect builds a model, it's a scaled-down little thing made of flimsy materials like cardboard and painted sponges. People understand that it takes a lot of work to create the real thing.
When a software architect builds a model, it looks just like the real thing and they think that means that it can go into production next week.
After all, "All You Have To Do Is..."
Aren't bugs impossible to avoid in programming, especially in complex projects? There's no such thing as a perfect programmer or perfect code; things can always be fixed, optimized, debugged, and improved. The brick wall analogy simply doesn't apply.
It's worse than that. Writing a program is like writing a contract with the Devil. You'll get exactly what you asked for, not exactly what you wanted.
Very few people have mastered the incredibly subtle art of knowing what to ask for in that much detail. And it really is true that one person's bug may be an incredibly useful feature to another person.