Nationalize all the commercial telecoms. Then convert them to local and regional cooperatives. Communications is a utility now. While we're at it, we can do the same with the commercial power companies. I am lucky enough to live in an area served by an electric co-op. I live next door to people who have a large fee attached to their electric bill just so that the local commercial power company can pretend to build a site for a nuclear plant that will never be constructed.
Yes. Intel is an Engineering company. And it's a science company.
Have you looked into how a fab works? How semiconductors work? Chipmakers depend more directly upon using and advancing science than possibly any other industry. Oil and gas companies possibly come close. Advancing the state of the chip making art is not about recombining well-known facts of physics in clever ways or managing complexity more creatively (though that's part of it). It's about finding and using new discoveries with science and making use of them at scale. Every technology node ("transistor shrink") requires advancing the limits of manufacturing for thousands of processes. Intel has armies of people trained purely in physics, chemistry, materials science, etc. solving the problems of reliably scaling the manufacture of things that just couldn't be made even just a few years ago.
Yes, they have suppliers who make very specialized equipment. These guys are ostensibly even closer to the "science". But, none of this really works without a lot of cooperation.
Let's be clear: Intel's profits shrink fast if science doesn't advance.
Funding STS is just about the most appropriate thing for these guys to do.
My wife is a teacher. She uses this at least once a year.
So far, she's used it to buy a a bunch of building blocks, books, a few bean bags, iPad reading and math apps and a few devices for non-verbal kids to learn to communicate.
It's pretty amazing how much people will contribute to helping kids learn. I suspect if you did it thoughtfully, you could get the $170 chromebooks for every kid in your class (or school) who can't afford one.
IT keeps systems running so that everyone can get their jobs done without armies of clerks and acres of file warehouses. Development either makes a product or designs the systems that IT operates (or both).
As for the rest of the company: hopefully, whatever they're doing to make the money is a net positive for the rest of us.
People really want things like being recognized, making a difference or being liked (or just having power). It's the nature of IT in large organizations that you will get less opportunities for many of these things. Development usually has more opportunities.
In sales, in production and in many other types of jobs you're likely to be working a deal or making a delivery. You have tangible results and direct contributions to the results. IT makes indirect contributions. It's not fruitless. It just feels that way.
You're going to have to get creative to find ways to feel and to show up to others as a valuable contributor. It's usually completely against the grain for thing-oriented introverts. If you really value how you and others feel about your work, you'll find a way or find another line of work. Good luck.
I call BS. The people running Chinese factories understand quality far better than most of the world. They are constantly concerned with it and have a mandate to move up the quality and technology chain, else lose their shirts when Vietnam or Bangladesh or some other poor Asian country hits the power curve part of the contract manufacturing business.
This guy must have picked the cheapest of cheap desperate Chinese manufacturers and then decided to ride them like hell on details. Apple, LG, Samsung and so many others build the top-quality devices in China. Anyone credible over there knows what they're doing.
There's three basic things that Microsoft is doing right these days and it applies to.NET as well as many of their other technologies / products.
1. They steadily iterate..NET had the advantage of avoiding a lot of the bad old parts of Java because it came afterward and the designers had a good handle on what wasn't working. When something is missing or isn't working well, they address it in the next release. Microsoft has had a fairly consistent 7 major releases in 12 years. The longest gap was 2.5 years from 1.1 to 2.0 and 3.5 to 4.0. Those were also where the biggest upgrades came from. Java went 4.5 years from v6 to v7 and then almost 3 more years to v8. There's been about 9 major releases in 20 years. The pace is slower, the gaps are longer. By itself this isn't a big deal, but when it comes to evolving to meet the needs of developers, MS has the advantage.
2. Microsoft has figured out how to play in the open..NET is well on its way to being a completely open, standardized technology. It's becoming viable to run it for real on Linux servers. The web stack is becoming very flexible and powerful. The advantages of openness that used to accrue to Apache and PHP and MySQL are now becoming strengths in.NET as well.
3..NET has Microsoft's superior documentation and support.
I really used to dislike M$. I wrote a fair amount of Java on Linux. The MS products and operating systems are not cheap. The have been ruthless competitors and sometimes illegally so. But it's really pretty amazing to consider how well they support their stuff and how well they document it relative to the messes I've dealt with in the Java world. Oracle just doesn't appear to have as strong a team at work behind their stuff.
I still love languages like Scala and Python and I still want Linux for most of my web servers, but the gaps are closing and the game is getting really interesting. If you are ignoring Microsoft, you may get caught by surprise.
Intel Xeon E3 1225 v2 (3.2GHz) on MSI Z77A-G41 (Because it was cheaper than the same i7 and better value than the latest gen at the time) 20 GB RAM Radeon R7 270 ? Samsung 256 GB SSD 2 & 4 TB hard disks.
Their products are uniformly flimsy, ugly and poorly constructed. It's truly more expensive to support these cheap things than to pay the difference for something of average or good quality.
> There's a risk of regression when exposing the code to many more systems
The risk of regression is due to refactoring, not due to testing. Ironic, given that the post cites de-obfuscation as a reason for doing this. Or perhaps our submitter just got an MBA and is learning to think and speak in management-ese.
To go further down that road: All assets are immediately turned over to the government and used to fund cleanup and mitigation. The government becomes the most preferred creditor.
My dad was a small-town banker and my father-in-law was a box factory floor manager.
Both managed to save over half a million before they retired through no particular brilliance, just hard work and saving.
If you're a developer younger than 35 and don't save a million before you retire, there's a good chance that you're either not going to retire or you're going to be poor when you do.
Retiring at 65 and living to 85 gets you 50k per year with a million dollars of savings. Investment and interest could extend that another 5 to 10 years. On the other hand, medical technology advancing gives you a pretty good chance of living that long. Save now. Spend later.
Rich people get income from "investment". Poor people get income by working. When you invest, you take the accumulated surplus work and use it to accumulate a larger surplus. You also retain more surplus. When you work, you directly contribute labor that is needed to sustain life and civilization and give away a "fair" portion of the surplus to your bosses.
We have a sliding tax scale. Everyone gets taxed 15.625% (social security and medicare) on labor. Except if your labor is valued about 2x to 3x above average. After $120k per year, you pay minimal additional SSI/Medicare. Then there's income. Income tax is mostly paid by fools and people who earn about 2x to 4x the average wage. If you're in the lower class, you probably pay nothing or get a small stipend from the government. If you earn average to about 2x average wage, you most likely pay 8 to 15% of your labor in income tax.
Then there's sales tax. That averages around 9.5%. It's effectively regressive because those of us who spend almost all of our income on things we need end up paying 6 to 10% of our income in sales taxes. Rich people spend very little of their total income in sales tax. They "spend" a lot of their income on generating more income instead of on taxable purchases. The sales tax rate is more like 1 to 2% of rich peoples income.
Then there's capital gains. Rich people earn most of their income from capital gains. They nominally pay 15 to 20% of capital gains in taxes. In reality, the richest people pay almost no capital gains because it's much cheaper to just buy tax loopholes and hire attorneys and accountants.
Lets say you work hard and manage to get yourself into the "upper middle class". Your family makes about $160k per year. Probably 7% of that goes to sales tax. Another 15% to SSI/Medicare. Another 10% to income taxes. Another 4% to various state and local taxes. You're paying about 36% of income in taxes. It could easily be more like 40%. The millionaire a few neighborhoods over? He pays about 3% in sales taxes because he only spends about 500k of his annual income. 20% in income taxes because most of it is capital gains. 5% in state taxes and 4% in SSI/Medicare because he doesn't have to pay much after around $120k. That's right: 32%. Also, his company may be getting tax breaks for "staying in the area" or investing in solar or whatever else he can finagle out of the local and state governments. So that's it for taxes.
Now, lets also look at how income is distributed. We already know that basically, right now, the rich get richer and the poor tread water or get poorer. How come? It pretty much flows naturally. Capitalism is mostly about competition. In nature, competition produces winners and losers. The alpha male lion does most of the mating (hence the "lion's share"). The most well adapted species survive and take over. The rest go extinct. There's a direct parallel between our economic system of unequal gains and the fact that we, as a species, are winning the competition for survival so thoroughly against every other species that we're presently causing the greatest mass extinction event in the history of the world.
Nature is really just an extension of physics whereby biology governs a set of complex chemical interactions that collect, store and expend energy in endlessly varying eddies, pools and swales. Life surfs on the energy gradient that exists between the sun and the vast cold emptiness of space. We are fractal perturbations of the otherwise straight forward march of entropy in the universe. Evolution is the process whereby life develops ever-more efficient and complex means of subsisting on smaller portions and more exotic locales in the energy landscape. This demands that the least efficient competitors die off to make room for more advanced ones.
We are transitioning out of the existing system, riding the phase-change whereby evolution is no longer being playing out exclusively in the biome, but also in memes manifested as technolo
It's simple. On the one hand there is the incentive to make the game enjoyable. On the other hand, there is an incentive to make the game less enjoyable if you don't pay. When you simply pay for access to the game, the incentives align. When you don't, the incentives are at odds. The only mitigating factor is that the game has to be enjoyable enough to get your attention in the first place.
Is anyone making sense of this? I know what all the terms are but the facts are more or less jumbled up together in ways that don't lend themselves to meaningful comparison.
If you haven't taught yourself programming by now, there isn't much point. Just move on. While the demand for good developers and engineers is strong and well publicized, demand for UI/UX people and tech writers is also pretty strong. It also doesn't hurt you to know multiple spoken languages in those fields.
None of that is appealing? Create a YouTube channel of explaining the topics that you like. If you really are good at explaining and demonstrating, someone will offer you work. The ad revenue makes a nice bonus.
What's the point? 1. you use less parts and cheaper parts in the power supply. 2. you have fewer and shorter cables 3. you use 5V, 3.3V, regulators that are the right size for the job. this saves space and saves material 4. you get to choose where to put these regulators so that heat management can be more optimal 5. it's easier to integrate the 12v battery with the space saved
What will that question get for you? How about asking, "Will you take a stand with me against sexual harassment in the hacker sub-culture?"
We live in a broader culture where that kind of harassment and assault is illegal. The way the sub-culture is doesn't matter. Want to make a difference? Don't act that way or tolerate those who do.
The jobs that these people do is harmful to the economy.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't continue some of the programs that are currently administered by these departments. Some of them obviously should be continued (I believe that there is a place for government in funding science and research. There are, however, other things that the government shouldn't be operating. The network of weather satellites should be sold off to private interests and the government should put out contracts for gathering weather data. The data itself should be made available to the public by the government (and the right to do so should be enforced in contract terms) but there is no reason to have a bureau that operates these things.
EDU: The federal government has absolutely no concern with funding or regulating education at any level. It's not interstate commerce. It's not national security. It's just an excuse to medal and win political points with naive voters. It is each citizens own responsibility to pursue his own education. That's not a function of government, be it national, state or local. The only thing that the loans and the grants, the regulations and the national standards do is make the whole business more expensive to manage and operate and create opportunities for waste and abuse. Every major function of EDU is duplicated by or originated in private institutions already. We waste money paying people to work for a department whose only practical function is to make education more expensive and less accessible.
HUD: This is the analog of the department of education which primarily serves the interests of the real estate and construction industries.
Energy: This is a bureaucratic black hole into which we dump money for pet projects and graft. It exists to serve giant energy companies and the military-industrial-national-security leviathan.
Interior: Other than the national park service, the USGS, fish and wildlife, it's hard to say what useful work goes on here. Many of the regulatory services exist to serve entrenched interests. Some of them are doing absolutely no useful work (this is the department that rubber-stamps oil rigs, pipelines, etc. leading to such disasters as the recent gulf oil spill). I can pretty much guarantee that Indian affairs has no legitimate use. That's a function for the state department.
Commerce: This is where made-up government economic statistics originate. They also specialize in interfering with trade.
My initial reaction was to categorize your remark as meaningless noise due to the following scoring: -1 Tone: Shouting, Belligerent, Rude -1 Name Calling -1 Making up a "fact"
However, I realized that this is about on par with the general level of "political" discourse in the U.S. So your post is now useful insofar as it is an example of how not to discuss an issue. Finally, I should note that there are no points given for minor creativity with phraseology such as "head-crushingly stupid". That stuff has no value when you're honestly trying to communicate to solve a problem or understand an issue. It only gets the attention of those who have no real interest in a legitimate discussion.
Please consider this before you make your next contribution to the topic. Otherwise, shut up. We can easily find meaningless, know-nothing shouting and banter on any of the scores of TV and news networks offered up by the mass media. The rest of us here would like to have an adult discussion.
There is a thing called an odometer. It's in every car. There's nothing wrong with requiring a car inspection every year and taxing mileage based on the odometer is a much cheaper and simpler and less intrusive way.
If they want to track you, they've already got your cell phone.
Slashdot Mirror
Nationalize all the commercial telecoms. Then convert them to local and regional cooperatives. Communications is a utility now. While we're at it, we can do the same with the commercial power companies. I am lucky enough to live in an area served by an electric co-op. I live next door to people who have a large fee attached to their electric bill just so that the local commercial power company can pretend to build a site for a nuclear plant that will never be constructed.
No more of this phony blackmail. [pun intended.]
Yes. Intel is an Engineering company. And it's a science company.
Have you looked into how a fab works? How semiconductors work? Chipmakers depend more directly upon using and advancing science than possibly any other industry. Oil and gas companies possibly come close. Advancing the state of the chip making art is not about recombining well-known facts of physics in clever ways or managing complexity more creatively (though that's part of it). It's about finding and using new discoveries with science and making use of them at scale. Every technology node ("transistor shrink") requires advancing the limits of manufacturing for thousands of processes. Intel has armies of people trained purely in physics, chemistry, materials science, etc. solving the problems of reliably scaling the manufacture of things that just couldn't be made even just a few years ago.
Yes, they have suppliers who make very specialized equipment. These guys are ostensibly even closer to the "science". But, none of this really works without a lot of cooperation.
Let's be clear: Intel's profits shrink fast if science doesn't advance.
Funding STS is just about the most appropriate thing for these guys to do.
My wife is a teacher. She uses this at least once a year.
So far, she's used it to buy a a bunch of building blocks, books, a few bean bags, iPad reading and math apps and a few devices for non-verbal kids to learn to communicate.
It's pretty amazing how much people will contribute to helping kids learn. I suspect if you did it thoughtfully, you could get the $170 chromebooks for every kid in your class (or school) who can't afford one.
Except that it's not fruitless.
IT keeps systems running so that everyone can get their jobs done without armies of clerks and acres of file warehouses. Development either makes a product or designs the systems that IT operates (or both).
As for the rest of the company: hopefully, whatever they're doing to make the money is a net positive for the rest of us.
People really want things like being recognized, making a difference or being liked (or just having power). It's the nature of IT in large organizations that you will get less opportunities for many of these things. Development usually has more opportunities.
In sales, in production and in many other types of jobs you're likely to be working a deal or making a delivery. You have tangible results and direct contributions to the results. IT makes indirect contributions. It's not fruitless. It just feels that way.
You're going to have to get creative to find ways to feel and to show up to others as a valuable contributor. It's usually completely against the grain for thing-oriented introverts. If you really value how you and others feel about your work, you'll find a way or find another line of work. Good luck.
I call BS. The people running Chinese factories understand quality far better than most of the world. They are constantly concerned with it and have a mandate to move up the quality and technology chain, else lose their shirts when Vietnam or Bangladesh or some other poor Asian country hits the power curve part of the contract manufacturing business.
This guy must have picked the cheapest of cheap desperate Chinese manufacturers and then decided to ride them like hell on details. Apple, LG, Samsung and so many others build the top-quality devices in China. Anyone credible over there knows what they're doing.
There's three basic things that Microsoft is doing right these days and it applies to .NET as well as many of their other technologies / products.
1. They steadily iterate. .NET had the advantage of avoiding a lot of the bad old parts of Java because it came afterward and the designers had a good handle on what wasn't working. When something is missing or isn't working well, they address it in the next release. Microsoft has had a fairly consistent 7 major releases in 12 years. The longest gap was 2.5 years from 1.1 to 2.0 and 3.5 to 4.0. Those were also where the biggest upgrades came from. Java went 4.5 years from v6 to v7 and then almost 3 more years to v8. There's been about 9 major releases in 20 years. The pace is slower, the gaps are longer. By itself this isn't a big deal, but when it comes to evolving to meet the needs of developers, MS has the advantage.
2. Microsoft has figured out how to play in the open. .NET is well on its way to being a completely open, standardized technology. It's becoming viable to run it for real on Linux servers. The web stack is becoming very flexible and powerful. The advantages of openness that used to accrue to Apache and PHP and MySQL are now becoming strengths in .NET as well.
3. .NET has Microsoft's superior documentation and support.
I really used to dislike M$. I wrote a fair amount of Java on Linux. The MS products and operating systems are not cheap. The have been ruthless competitors and sometimes illegally so. But it's really pretty amazing to consider how well they support their stuff and how well they document it relative to the messes I've dealt with in the Java world. Oracle just doesn't appear to have as strong a team at work behind their stuff.
I still love languages like Scala and Python and I still want Linux for most of my web servers, but the gaps are closing and the game is getting really interesting. If you are ignoring Microsoft, you may get caught by surprise.
Intel Xeon E3 1225 v2 (3.2GHz) on MSI Z77A-G41 (Because it was cheaper than the same i7 and better value than the latest gen at the time)
20 GB RAM
Radeon R7 270 ?
Samsung 256 GB SSD
2 & 4 TB hard disks.
Their products are uniformly flimsy, ugly and poorly constructed. It's truly more expensive to support these cheap things than to pay the difference for something of average or good quality.
> There's a risk of regression when exposing the code to many more systems
The risk of regression is due to refactoring, not due to testing. Ironic, given that the post cites de-obfuscation as a reason for doing this. Or perhaps our submitter just got an MBA and is learning to think and speak in management-ese.
I, for one, welcome our robot overlords. Too soon? They aren't robots yet?
I, for one, welcome our shadowy human overlords.
To go further down that road: All assets are immediately turned over to the government and used to fund cleanup and mitigation. The government becomes the most preferred creditor.
My dad was a small-town banker and my father-in-law was a box factory floor manager.
Both managed to save over half a million before they retired through no particular brilliance, just hard work and saving.
If you're a developer younger than 35 and don't save a million before you retire, there's a good chance that you're either not going to retire or you're going to be poor when you do.
Retiring at 65 and living to 85 gets you 50k per year with a million dollars of savings. Investment and interest could extend that another 5 to 10 years. On the other hand, medical technology advancing gives you a pretty good chance of living that long. Save now. Spend later.
Rich people get income from "investment". Poor people get income by working. When you invest, you take the accumulated surplus work and use it to accumulate a larger surplus. You also retain more surplus. When you work, you directly contribute labor that is needed to sustain life and civilization and give away a "fair" portion of the surplus to your bosses.
We have a sliding tax scale. Everyone gets taxed 15.625% (social security and medicare) on labor. Except if your labor is valued about 2x to 3x above average. After $120k per year, you pay minimal additional SSI/Medicare.
Then there's income. Income tax is mostly paid by fools and people who earn about 2x to 4x the average wage. If you're in the lower class, you probably pay nothing or get a small stipend from the government. If you earn average to about 2x average wage, you most likely pay 8 to 15% of your labor in income tax.
Then there's sales tax. That averages around 9.5%. It's effectively regressive because those of us who spend almost all of our income on things we need end up paying 6 to 10% of our income in sales taxes. Rich people spend very little of their total income in sales tax. They "spend" a lot of their income on generating more income instead of on taxable purchases. The sales tax rate is more like 1 to 2% of rich peoples income.
Then there's capital gains. Rich people earn most of their income from capital gains. They nominally pay 15 to 20% of capital gains in taxes. In reality, the richest people pay almost no capital gains because it's much cheaper to just buy tax loopholes and hire attorneys and accountants.
Lets say you work hard and manage to get yourself into the "upper middle class". Your family makes about $160k per year. Probably 7% of that goes to sales tax. Another 15% to SSI/Medicare. Another 10% to income taxes. Another 4% to various state and local taxes. You're paying about 36% of income in taxes. It could easily be more like 40%. The millionaire a few neighborhoods over? He pays about 3% in sales taxes because he only spends about 500k of his annual income. 20% in income taxes because most of it is capital gains. 5% in state taxes and 4% in SSI/Medicare because he doesn't have to pay much after around $120k. That's right: 32%. Also, his company may be getting tax breaks for "staying in the area" or investing in solar or whatever else he can finagle out of the local and state governments. So that's it for taxes.
Now, lets also look at how income is distributed. We already know that basically, right now, the rich get richer and the poor tread water or get poorer. How come? It pretty much flows naturally. Capitalism is mostly about competition. In nature, competition produces winners and losers. The alpha male lion does most of the mating (hence the "lion's share"). The most well adapted species survive and take over. The rest go extinct. There's a direct parallel between our economic system of unequal gains and the fact that we, as a species, are winning the competition for survival so thoroughly against every other species that we're presently causing the greatest mass extinction event in the history of the world.
Nature is really just an extension of physics whereby biology governs a set of complex chemical interactions that collect, store and expend energy in endlessly varying eddies, pools and swales. Life surfs on the energy gradient that exists between the sun and the vast cold emptiness of space. We are fractal perturbations of the otherwise straight forward march of entropy in the universe. Evolution is the process whereby life develops ever-more efficient and complex means of subsisting on smaller portions and more exotic locales in the energy landscape. This demands that the least efficient competitors die off to make room for more advanced ones.
We are transitioning out of the existing system, riding the phase-change whereby evolution is no longer being playing out exclusively in the biome, but also in memes manifested as technolo
It's simple. On the one hand there is the incentive to make the game enjoyable. On the other hand, there is an incentive to make the game less enjoyable if you don't pay. When you simply pay for access to the game, the incentives align. When you don't, the incentives are at odds. The only mitigating factor is that the game has to be enjoyable enough to get your attention in the first place.
Box, DropBox, Etsy, Twitter and Facebook and Amazon all rely on MySQL at "webscale".
Perhaps this will also work for our friend.
Is anyone making sense of this? I know what all the terms are but the facts are more or less jumbled up together in ways that don't lend themselves to meaningful comparison.
If you haven't taught yourself programming by now, there isn't much point. Just move on.
While the demand for good developers and engineers is strong and well publicized, demand for UI/UX people and tech writers is also pretty strong.
It also doesn't hurt you to know multiple spoken languages in those fields.
None of that is appealing? Create a YouTube channel of explaining the topics that you like. If you really are good at explaining and demonstrating, someone will offer you work. The ad revenue makes a nice bonus.
You should have told him to hire a brick layer and given him your two weeks notice.
ASM, C are no where near the abstraction level of LabView.
C++ is higher but so complex that it's useless for rapid development.
Labview is at a much higher level of abstraction. Of course it's designed essentially for hardware folks to do software with a low learning curve.
Comparable level text-based languages would be something like Python or Matlab. Have you tried those?
I agree. And there's no evidence that it would be different under McCain or Romney or Clinton.
What's the point?
1. you use less parts and cheaper parts in the power supply.
2. you have fewer and shorter cables
3. you use 5V, 3.3V, regulators that are the right size for the job. this saves space and saves material
4. you get to choose where to put these regulators so that heat management can be more optimal
5. it's easier to integrate the 12v battery with the space saved
What will that question get for you? How about asking, "Will you take a stand with me against sexual harassment in the hacker sub-culture?"
We live in a broader culture where that kind of harassment and assault is illegal. The way the sub-culture is doesn't matter. Want to make a difference? Don't act that way or tolerate those who do.
The jobs that these people do is harmful to the economy.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't continue some of the programs that are currently administered by these departments. Some of them obviously should be continued (I believe that there is a place for government in funding science and research. There are, however, other things that the government shouldn't be operating. The network of weather satellites should be sold off to private interests and the government should put out contracts for gathering weather data. The data itself should be made available to the public by the government (and the right to do so should be enforced in contract terms) but there is no reason to have a bureau that operates these things.
EDU: The federal government has absolutely no concern with funding or regulating education at any level. It's not interstate commerce. It's not national security. It's just an excuse to medal and win political points with naive voters. It is each citizens own responsibility to pursue his own education. That's not a function of government, be it national, state or local. The only thing that the loans and the grants, the regulations and the national standards do is make the whole business more expensive to manage and operate and create opportunities for waste and abuse. Every major function of EDU is duplicated by or originated in private institutions already. We waste money paying people to work for a department whose only practical function is to make education more expensive and less accessible.
HUD: This is the analog of the department of education which primarily serves the interests of the real estate and construction industries.
Energy: This is a bureaucratic black hole into which we dump money for pet projects and graft. It exists to serve giant energy companies and the military-industrial-national-security leviathan.
Interior: Other than the national park service, the USGS, fish and wildlife, it's hard to say what useful work goes on here. Many of the regulatory services exist to serve entrenched interests. Some of them are doing absolutely no useful work (this is the department that rubber-stamps oil rigs, pipelines, etc. leading to such disasters as the recent gulf oil spill). I can pretty much guarantee that Indian affairs has no legitimate use. That's a function for the state department.
Commerce: This is where made-up government economic statistics originate. They also specialize in interfering with trade.
My initial reaction was to categorize your remark as meaningless noise due to the following scoring:
-1 Tone: Shouting, Belligerent, Rude
-1 Name Calling
-1 Making up a "fact"
However, I realized that this is about on par with the general level of "political" discourse in the U.S. So your post is now useful insofar as it is an example of how not to discuss an issue. Finally, I should note that there are no points given for minor creativity with phraseology such as "head-crushingly stupid". That stuff has no value when you're honestly trying to communicate to solve a problem or understand an issue. It only gets the attention of those who have no real interest in a legitimate discussion.
Please consider this before you make your next contribution to the topic. Otherwise, shut up. We can easily find meaningless, know-nothing shouting and banter on any of the scores of TV and news networks offered up by the mass media. The rest of us here would like to have an adult discussion.
There is a thing called an odometer. It's in every car. There's nothing wrong with requiring a car inspection every year and taxing mileage based on the odometer is a much cheaper and simpler and less intrusive way.
If they want to track you, they've already got your cell phone.
This GPS stuff is idiotic.