In the united states there are several layers of laws that apply: International, Federal, State, County, City. Each layer is composed of written, common and case law. Additionally, there are at least four layers of regulation that can affect your actions as well religious and cultural norms. Just because the federal government isn't allowed to restrict some act, doesn't even come close to giving you the right to do it. In fact, if any one organizational layer was allowed to override all the others, we would live in a much less viable society.
Wall St. has the most highly privileged position of any industry in the world (including defense contractors and oil companies) and we all pay to keep them from being exposed to market forces of any real substance. They collectively have control over the mechanisms of corporate commerce and the whole money supply. You think that this conglomeration of power is somehow benign or beneficial to you?
Do you think that just because Wall St. is reporting good corporate profits and banks are lending a little money here and there that the real economy is somehow on track? Unemployment is still terribly high, taxes on most of us are higher than ever and climbing and so is public debt. Real incomes for most Americans and Europeans are falling or stagnant. Trillions of dollars were misspent on ridiculously overpriced housing and the asset base of the middle class has been eviscerated.
The sad thing is that most people are never going to wake up to the reality that taxes come in many forms. It's not just what you pay to the IRS and the states. You pay by inflation. You pay by being forced to buy myriad overpriced goods and services (healthcare, banking, insurance, food, energy, housing, drugs...) which are offered in markets that are heavily tilted by regulation and subsidy. You pay when your family and friends go off to fight and die in unjust, illegal wars to further the interests of the profiteers. And you're not just paying for the services you get. You're paying for wars on drugs. You're paying for corporate welfare. You're paying for the biggest prison industry and the biggest military industry in the history of the world.
So yeah, keep telling the rest of us how stupid we are for making the connections. Don't worry. The economy and government are big and complicated. Keep telling yourself that no one interest or group has enough leverage to push the whole thing in their favor, or that all the little levers pushed by the rich players aren't tilting the whole thing over into an unsustainable landslide that could, and probably will end in catastrophe.
Let me tell you that it's not some giant conspiracy. It's just some rich people looking to protect their assets. They push a little here, they get a little richer. They get more power to push a little harder and over the years, and the layers of corruption get deeper. The harbors of safety for the top players become institutionalized. Every generation of elites pushes a little harder to grow their fortunes and consolidate their advantages. Look at one of the symptoms: big complex tax codes. Another symptom: Banks too big to fail dictating their own regulations.
It doesn't require a huge amount of greed or evil by any one party. It's just the rich and powerful people saying to themselves, "I'm rich because I work hard and I'm smarter than most of these other people and I'm going to use my advantage to make sure I stay rich by screwing the rest of them over just a little." When that happens millions of times for a few hundred years, it leads to what we've got today. A million "just a little" things turn into a big burden for the folks who play by the rules that others make.
I broke down and bought a Mac Mini after about a month of unsuccessfully trying to get OSX Hackintoshed to be stable on my various PCs. I want to develop iPad/iPhone apps and thats really the only way to do it without some kind of compromise. Unfortunately, it now also costs $5 to buy XCode on the Mac App Store (previously a free download), unless you pay the $100/year for an IOS development license (which I'm not going to do until I'm ready to ship something). If $5 gets Apple to make XCode a more professional tool, I'm all for it, but I suspect this will not be the case. I also have doubts that Apple will completely wall-off the Mac. People get a lot of value from free utilities, etc., that they download from the web. Forcing all those utilities into the Mac App Store would also force the authors into proprietary models and probably into paying the $100/year dev license. In a lot of ways it would emaciate the Mac software "ecosystem" and end up deteriorating the value of the platform. I think Apple would be happy to just get fees for brokering almost all of the paid Mac apps by making the Mac App Store the avenue of choice for buying Mac software. I can also see how it might be good for developers of free apps. Download the free version on a website or pay $1 for the supported version via the M.A.S.
On the other hand, it's a much more reasonable price than, e.g., Visual Studio 2010 Pro ($650+). I just don't understand how Microsoft can swing from ~$250 for VS 2008 Standard and then $550 for the upgrade to 2010 or $650 for the full product. VS is much higher quality than XCode, but the pricing difference is outrageous. But, looking at Microsoft's whole lineup, nothing is priced reasonably. At least with Mac hardware, I'm getting something that is well-made and is priced in the ballpark of what's reasonable (Yes, I'm looking at you, Visio Pro 2010!). Enough bitching. Back to work.
Your clarification could use some corrections as well. AQ (terrorists herein described as AQ for purposes of simplification) was in Iraq for a time. The tide turned in the surge mainly due to the actions of the local militias. Granted, we bribed and strong-armed them onto action, but mainly they were getting really sick of the foreigners destroying their lives and afraid of the kind of indiscriminate killing that our surge numbers would produce. They drove out and killed most of the foreigners because they can tell the difference and we largely can't. Now they're having a quiet civil war that is just barely kept in check by our presence. The populace wants us out so they can move on with winning or losing and the politicians we've backed want us to stay so they don't get slaughtered by the next strong-man to emerge when we leave. What we can claim to have done is initiate a war based on false pretenses that attracted AQ there. Once there, we attacked terrorists and anyone else with a weapon in-hand. In the process, over a million locals have been killed (not just Iraqis, because a significant minority were foreigners) and the society has been pretty much turned inside-out. Hardly anyone would say that Iraq is more stable and less friendly to terrorism than before we invaded.
Afghanistan has hardly been a more successful campaign. It's now the number one opium growing region in the world. We and our proxies are in active negotiation to re-establish the Taliban as part of the power bloc controlling the region so that we may leave without looking like the cause of another civil war there, which will almost inevitably lead to regional powers that are friendly to AQ. I say region, because Afghanistan cannot properly be called a country in the way we think of it. It's a conglomeration of tribes that share some allegiance to regional authorities which sometimes broker relations with the outside world. We treat it as a state because we had to attack it and on a political level we have no understanding of a non-state entity.
Finally: Iran now has more influence over both of their neighbors than before. We did kill Bin Laden and a bunch of other terrorists. It has so far cost the lives of over 7,000 U.S. soldiers, 32,000 U.S. wounded, probably a million+ civilians and over a trillion dollars.
You mentioned that the airport security response is in the right direction, but largely bungled. I would argue that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the same scenario. Response in the right direction but costing so many lives and dollars at a scale so large that we just don't comprehend the tragedy. Yes, we should attack and kill terrorists. We should support democracy over tyranny. The reality is that we support tyranny because it's easier to deal with one client than a few million who are not as easily bought-off. If we stop supporting dictators, a lot of the fuel for the fire of terrorism will be removed and we won't have to go to war in the process.
Schools should do what keeps them in business. If someone is going to pay them to subsidize expensive STEM education, that's what will keep them going, so they should run with that. Without subsidy, they should charge according to costs, since running the program at a loss makes no economic sense and will just lead to them closing their doors.
Why don't we have more US citizen STEM majors and STEM students going into industry? Because people who have citizenship and speak US English fluently are also likely to know the score: you make much more money working for financial manipulators than for productive industry. Foreigners often don't know the score, or they have a harder time swimming in the culture of the business sharks. They go to industry jobs because they are able to get them, don't know any better and anyway industry jobs are a huge improvement over the crap they put up with in the 3rd world. Then there's the people who just love doing it and wouldn't sacrifice their passion just for money. I guess. Those people are, as expected, pretty rare.
Want to make the US competitive, r.e. high tech industry? Want to avoid pitfalls like raising STEM education prices? Fix business climate. Let me say right now that it's just not going to happen before a truly major catastrophe hits us. Wall St. owns the gov't and hasn't suffered at all in comparison to the rest of the nation for the crisis they created. Anyhow, here's a short list of things to fix:
* Remove or short-circuit the political influence of the controlling elite. Their interests normally align well enough with society to allow them the privilege of their economic and political advantages. This is no longer the case. They're now eating our lunches so fast that the real economy is shrinking and they don't realize that they're going to eventually have things much harder when they aren't leeching off a fat and growing middle class but a poor and hollowed-out one.
* Stop externalizing all non-monetary costs. Foreign outsourcing is profitable for the elite and terrible for the society. Destroying the ecology by ruthlessly sucking out natural resources is fantastically profitable. So is keeping dehumanized workers hard under the thumb of management. This single item addresses so many problems that we face, it's not even funny. Almost all economics research should be directed at properly measuring the real costs and benefits of economic activity and giving us the tools to properly decide what to pursue.
* End corporate personhood. Corporations exist as vehicles for accumulations capital and resources to survive changes in management and ownership. The incentives for all parties involved is so far tilted to the short-term that it is really just a mandate to slash, burn, rape and pillage by any legal (or otherwise) means necessary. Personhood rewards this behavior with both unfair advantages and immortality.
* Adjunct the single corporate mandate of profit-seeking with the proper mandate that each corporation has a net benefit to society (including non-monetary costs).
* Demolish regulation and lawyer-strangulation in health-care and replace it with a highly visible system of certification. Make the patient pay for his services and let him decide what he's going to buy. Right now we're all forced to buy health care in the form of Cadillacs. Services have an enormous burden of administration and regulation. There are no health-care pintos. If the huge regulatory and insurance burden is removed and Sally the nurse can treat everyday injuries and colds out of her house or her van without two hired paperwork shufflers to make her legal, then her competition will reduce costs because the Caddy dealership doctors and hospitals will have to compete to survive. You really shouldn't be able to sue your caregivers. They're human and they're going to make mistakes. The key is to focus on making those mistakes both rare and less costly for you and for them. Modern medicine CAN do wonderful things but the ex
Evolution causes mother nature to be very efficient in her selection of characteristics. It might just be that green is useful to plants because it is the right wavelength for efficient photosynthesis with the sun's light. It might be green because it's much easier for plants to make green chloroplasts than other colors or because green imparts enough energy without overheating the leaf structure or its easier for plants to repair green proteins than other colors. If you read up on it a bit, you find out that green does not really maximize energy production, but it's apparently optimal for most plants. However, there's plenty of earth plants that aren't green! Surprisingly there's few black plants. We think too often about optimizing a single parameter. Usually that parameter is short term cash flow. The natural world is a more-or-less true form of capitalism and it's brutal but it shows us that short-term gain isn't the only thing worth maximizing and in nature there's no way to externalize costs for the long-term. Those that do, don't survive.
Google's main task is to determine what pages best relate to a given set of key words and what ads best fit a given page. Since the service is so valuable, people are always trying to game it. If it wants to use genetic algorithms or some form of self-improvement on its search function, it's important to penalize algorithms which give the SEO gamers' pages too much weight in search results. That penalty would be measured by regret.
A corporation's only mandate is to make money. Microsoft doesn't poison wells or denude wetlands to make its money, but it's not estranged from all of the immoral-though-legal acts that every rich bastard makes use of to work the system. It's not a proud thing to be the most honest of all thieves.
pbxes.org is just not reliable enough. In my experience it goes down at least once a month. It's also highly technical and at some point you just want to stop worrying about the technical details and make and receive calls without hassles. You might as well run asterisk on your own server or on a VPS. Also, Google Voice, while having a fantastic interface and good reliability, introduces an often unacceptable latency into phone conversations. My co-workers and I have tried paid alternatives to GV, such as phone.com. The latency issue is similar, though voice quality and consistency is somewhat better. My own solution, for now, is to use AT&T on my phone when I'm roaming about the world and use Callcentric (callcentric.com) for VOIP service if AT&T coverage is weak and I have WI-FI available (e.g. in my home office). The disadvantage is, of course, that you have multiple phone numbers and it's sometimes confusing for people who are used to you calling from one number. I still use GV for voicemail but not for calling (programmed AT&T to forward voicemail to my google number). This is not a simple approach and it's not what you're looking for but it's what works right now. VOIP on cell phones (and in general, really) is still not mature enough so that it's always easy for any device to work perfectly with any service. I have a few software VOIP clients on my phone. I prefer Acrobits Softphone and Bria Softphone apps on my iPhone. I also have Skype. It's annoying enough for me to avoid it most of the time. Having run my phone on both AT&T and on TMobile's networks, I can tell you that it's not that feasible to do VOIP over GSM with either carrier on the iPhone. It may be feasible with Sprint/Clearwire and a different phone, but I'm not that interested in trying. My suggestion, if you're going to do 4G wireless is to just use a VOIP carrier like Callcentric with your data plan. However, I have doubts that the latency and reliability will be adequate. Good luck.
By the way, I came to this conclusion by starting out with an iPod touch and VOIP software, moving to a 3GS with VOIP software (hacked to use the iPad data plan ($15/mo)). Eventually settling on the current iPhone 4 + pretty cheap VOIP (less than $5/mo). Yes I could go Android but I don't like the phones. Yes I could go Verizon but I want voice+data at the same time. Yes I could go Sprint but their service isn't really superior to AT&T in my area and, for me, the jailbroken iPhone beats the EVO (although it's the best Android phone for my money).
Your idea is a gaming geeks dream and a business manager's nightmare. Consoles are popular for consumers, publishers and developers because they offer standardized, large market platforms for the game products. Games cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. You have to amortize that cost over a lot of copies. Third party publishers can afford to put new games on two of three console platforms because it makes sense to add 25% to the production effort to net a 33% increase in potential market. With the PC market, with all the crazy available configurations, it makes no sense to add 50% or more effort and net a 10 to 20% gain in potential customers. That's why the AAA titles strongly prefer consoles over PCs. Once someone figures out how to truely standardize the programming interface for games on the PC, it will be nearly as popular as consoles. The guys at Valve have figured this out, though they haven't really made the huge commitment to making it happen full scale. They are making a ton of money with their limited goals of reducing the cost of distribution and marketing. OnLive is another concern that is headed in exactly the same direction with a much different means of getting there. The potential is there to make billions but the hurdles are still huge.
The truth is that graphics and AI are not the be-all, end-all of gaming experience. World of Warcraft and Starcraft are brilliant examples of games with cartoony, par-level graphics that could be adapted to the current gen. of consoles. Neither game is meant to be played without a keyboard, but they're brilliant, hugely popular games that work because they have excellent gameplay, not over-the-top graphics, AI, physics, etc. Angry Birds is another example of a universally popular game that requires no huge graphics, sound or high-power processing to make it fantastically fun. Fun always trumps glitz. Always.
It's much more fun to pop in a game and play than to pop in a disc, install it, click a million times, agree to terms, input a code, update drivers, turn off antivirus, reboot and wait for long long load times than it is to just relax on the couch and play the stupid game. PCs do have inherent advantages over consoles in the input and processing power departments but the setup, maintenance and support disadvantages make all but the highest-quality, best funded publishers shrink from attempting to build and continue AAA franchises on the PC platform. It makes much more sense to do low-tech, low investment stuff on the PC.
All that said, I vastly prefer the PC because smarter, more complex, more involved games show up there due to the superiority of mouse-and-keyboard input. Next favorite platform is my phone. The only times I have regretted not having a console are when I read about Red Dead Redemption and Heavy Rain. But there's no way I'm buying each console to play two games.
Get a bus ticket. Stay in a cheap motel or a hostel. You can afford this. Meeting people is always worth it if you do a small amount of work to maintain your connections. Why pass up an opportunity in this economy?
China has set its tariffs, exchange rates, rules and standards to tilt the game in favor of employing Chinese labor for producing manufactured goods and for making exporters selling to China pay to compete. We aren't doing that. We protect the big native industries like agriculture which have real political clout and can't be outsourced and we consciously knock down any and all barriers to outsourcing our manufacturing because this feeds the bottom line of multinational manufacturers (in the short term).
By the way, those big Ag. industries also employ hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, which keeps their costs down. This also is intentional. It's why we don't have real immigration reform. We have huge oil subsidies and expensive health care because all of the laws are written to make profits flow up. It's not a conspiracy. It's just a reflection of the fact that money naturally concentrates at the top and it is so easy to buy the type of legislation (or lack thereof) that can distort markets and help the money keep flowing up. Add in the hidden tax of inflation on everyone, the enormous tax on investors of the privileged super-connected Wall Streeters and the huge money sink that is the military-industrial complex and it's fairly easy to see that we're vacuuming cash out of the politically powerless middle and lower classes into the pockets of the politically connected upper class. All of the economic data of the last 30 years supports this. The richest 10% owns over half of all assets. Working class wages have fallen down a hill for the past 35 years (especially when you count that we've nearly doubled the available labor pool by putting women to work!). Our standard of living has fallen while our personal, government and corporate debts have ballooned. Big business thrives by setting the rules in favor of itself and against the smaller up-and-comers.
I used to believe that this just wasn't the case. I used to believe 100% in the unregulated free market. Perhaps I still do, but the reality today is that we're regulating and lawyering ourselves into oblivion. To get back to the original point: if we hadn't spent the last 30 years outrageously inflating the cost of our own labor (see all the reasons above) and knocking down every obstacle to outsourcing it abroad, our stores would be more than half-full with goods that are made in USA. Even with all the ridiculous overhead that we've imposed on ourselves, US labor isn't completely uncompetitive. We have more skilled workers than anywhere in the world. If the cost of healthcare for employees were to be cut from 17% of GDP to the perfectly adequate 7%; if we didn't pay outrageous insurance rates at every turn because of a legal system gone mad; if we didn't have huge unnecessary tax rates to pay for ridiculous military boondoggles, big industry subsidies and misguided regulation; if we didn't spend so much money just in transaction costs and debt maintenance imposed by Wall Street leeches, we'd have much cheaper labor and capital. We'd have competitive labor and capital. All of these things are costs in and of themselves and they compound each other.
Give me a break? You buy this drivel? You just made the case that because our system is set-up to externalize as many costs as possible in favor of short-term profit, it must be OK. So goes the thinking of the rest of the idiots who have driven the economy off a cliff: "It's not illegal, so it must be OK." In the technology world, we have an entire industry dedicated to figuring out the impact of technological change on society and the human implications of that change. It's called Science Fiction. We think about what could happen; what could go wrong; what could go right and we write millions of stories about it. Of course many of these stories are unrealistic, but they're interesting and many have a kernel of truth. It plants seeds in our minds and we start to think about the implications of things like unfettered AI, bioengineering, nuclear arms and the expansion of humanity into new worlds where we are divided by vast chasms of time, space, environment and genetics. I'm not saying that we're somehow more moral or more responsible because Sci Fi exists. However, we have a clue and our awareness is heightened and we aren't completely blind to our own collective destiny. We do what we do because at some level we love it. Maybe the investment bankers and CEOs of the world love what they do too, but since the stakes are so high, the more likely motivating factor is just plain greed. There is no room for self-reflection in avaricious minds.
China is not an evil empire. But it has shown a tendency to systematically suppress the lives of the lower classes in favor of the ruling classes for thousands of years. There's little evidence that this is different today. So many of the values we claim to hold dear are antithetical to their way of life. Read, for instance, stories about Chinese Mothering to see where the individual is repressed to favor some other goal of more immediate and concrete utility. If mothers are forcing their wills relentlessly on their children all over China, what lessons does the Chinese ruling class take to it's job of governing and use of its increasing power? Since most of us aren't in the ruling class, we have a lot to lose if they become the next hegemony.
It's taken a lot of hard, expensive work and lives were lost in developing the technologies that gave us the edge to "win" the cold war. Now we're bartering this long-term advantage for some short-term profits? And you say this is justified? I see this as a sign that we're circling the drain. Our grandparents' generation would recognize this for what it is: Treason.
First of all, it’s not useful to dismiss this guy because he’s not a climatologist. As an R&D engineer who works with everyone from technicians to theoretical physicists and mathematicians, I can tell you that the biggest difference between equally talented minds is not in the job they do, but the mindset of the person doing the work. There are plenty of theoretical engineers and practical physicists. Titles don't really have as much meaning as we tend to give them when it comes to the credibility of a source.
Secondly, I would argue that there are many, many hard problems that we must deal with as a society this century. They include (in no particular order):
Climate Change
Overpopulation and increased competition for limited and non-renewable resources
Continuing human-driven mass extinction
The unchecked rise of authoritarianism
The world-wide mis-allocation of wealth compounded by the free flow of goods and capital which outmaneuvers traditional regulatory and social checks on vast concentrations of power
The escalating probability of compound catastrophes due to the weakened social and economic fabric of civilization at a time when we are overdue for several types of natural disaster (volcanoes, earthquakes, asteroid impacts).
The growing probability of terrorist acts causing large-scale catastrophe due to the continual refinement and broader availability of advanced weapons technologies
I’m sure I’m missing some important ones. These are just generalized root causes that give rise to many particular problems such as the historically-high potential for, and ongoing cost of disease epidemics (e.g. AIDS, malaria), due to population density and the mis-allocation of wealth.
We are living in a small, dense, interconnected world where economic borders are vanishing for the wealthy but growing for the poor and middle classes. We have to confront these problems not as nations but as a whole human society. We’re nowhere near that level of integration, but big social and technological changes can happen quickly, which can drive big economic and political changes.
The cost of dealing with climate change is enormous. It’s greater than several years of worldwide economic output. This points to the fact that to best deal with the problems we confront, we’re going to have to balance costs and benefits. We have to live in the real world and prioritize our goals. I, personally, doubt that we will survive the next century without incurring massive disastrous losses, perhaps catastrophic losses (Disaster is when a large-scale failure occurs. Catastrophe is when failures result in large-scale losses of life). I won’t go as far as saying that all civilization will end. But I believe that billions of lives will be lost and tens of billions more will be oppressed unnecessarily due to our own lack of coordination and abundance of short-sightedness.
The bottom line is that I don’t think that solving the climate change problem is either practical or desirable as a goal by itself in the context of the many other problems which are of greater consequence. These problems must be dealt-with in concert rather than individually if we have a hope of avoiding catastrophe.
Finally, I will say that the complexity argument is not hollow. I have not seen evidence that climate is a less chaotic system than weather. By their nature, chaotic systems cannot be modeled beyond a short horizon. In climatology 100 years is indeed a short horizon, but these models are also supposed to make a lot of predictions which don’t seem to be verifiable except by waiting. Running the models with varied inputs and seeing a statistical convergence doesn’t prove that they model reality, only that the models produce convergent results. Running them backwards doesn’t really produce meaningful results either. We have constructed useful weather models by testing them aga
When everyone buys index funds, the index managers have huge leverage to manipulate. The high freq traders have more leverage to manipulate the fund traders. The market as a whole becomes more correlated. There's nothing wrong with index investing, but if everyone does a lot of index investing, at some point you are looking into a pricing hall of mirrors instead of a working market and it takes fewer and smaller non-conforming players get enough leverage to tilt the whole applecart. We already see the effects of this from the studies that show that the markets are now more correlated than before the popularity of the index funds.
If you want to limit the effects of rogue players, don't just ignore them. Prohibit their abuses. The 5-second trade granularity mentioned above seems like a good start.
I'm not usually one to spout the standard talking points but: 1) All the harm caused by the leaks was theoretical. Not one person or operation has been shown to be harmed by this leak in any real way. 2) Whereas actual corruption, destruction and death on a massive scale have been caused by the interminable Afghan and Iraqi wars that have been prosecuted badly and under false pretenses and with a constant cover of official lies and minimal scrutiny by mainstream media.
I hope Palin truly is unelectable. She has no understanding of anything beyond how to present the rhetoric handed to her by her handlers and act the part of a figurehead. Here's to hoping that the worst damage she can do is as a lightning-rod and a distraction from the real issues. Lord help us if she gets and keeps any official power.
Some of the movies that would seem to benefit most from 3D, don't work out in practice. Kids movies would be obvious winners here, but last time I took my 4-year-old nephew to see a 3D movie we had to leave early because the glasses didn't fit his head. When they keep falling off, you can't watch the movie and when you don't have them on, it's mostly just a blur.
We got our money back.
Avatar was pretty good in 3D/IMAX, though I'm not sure it wouldn't be just as good in just IMAX.
The things you just mentioned are all things that all sides agree are basic services. They're not usually up for debate. Also, all but one are part of local and state government. You start talking about socialism when the government interferes in the private economy to achieve what are ostensibly social gains that can't otherwise be practically made. However, it's pretty obvious in this case that there's basically no social gain. It's an outright power grab. It's probably illegal. So, while it's not classically socialism, it is flying under that banner. Are you happier with fascism? Does arguing over what to call this horrible behavior do anything to stop it?
Increasingly, I'd just like to vote for no one. We can just fire the incumbent and leave the position vacant. It's time to down-size. Let the senate nominate some key positions such as secretary of state. Let the people vote directly on the budget electronically. It's time to start lopping off the cancerous tentacles of the leviathan.
It's not that the end of humanity is on its way. It's the end of this economy. At some point, everyone will come to realize:
That the nation's debt, is only getting bigger, and
That our economy is not going to grow enough to even keep station with current levels, much less the exploding debt we are taking on.
That most of the wealth in the nation is concentrated at the top more densely than any other time in our history (the top 1% wealthiest people own 2/3 of all US assets), and
That most of the pain (the tab for the bills coming due) is going to be laid on the middle class, not on the elites at the top.
There's not going to be a jobs recovery. A huge big chunk of our economy was dedicated to developing real estate and financing the sale of that development. The value of real estate is just not coming back for decades. Those jobs are permanently gone, just like the textile jobs of yore. There are no replacements in services or in manufacturing. Our technology edge is eroding and as it vanishes, so too will the production of the remaining expensive manufactured goods that we make here.
Gold ATMs are not useful except in the most dire emergencies. If you need to use one, it's already too late. No one is going to sell gold in the midst of a currency crisis. These things exist to take advantage of the fool. The reason they will make money is that even a fool can see that there is a crisis coming, while very few have any good plan for dealing with it.
Lets put this in simple terms.
Imagine you're a farmer with 30 acres. It takes 20 acres to feed your family. 66% of the crop takes care of your immediate needs and 33% goes to savings and taxes. At a rate of 25%, the government takes 1/4 of your crop and you have 9% for savings. The government is having a bad year and decides to raise taxes. The rate is going up from 25% to 30%. No problem, you say. That leaves 3.3% of what you farm as a buffer to sell and use for savings. Last year you saved your profits to eventually invest in new equipment that will increase your yields by 25%. You can't buy that equipment this year because you won't have enough savings. The economy doesn't grow. Equipment doesn't get bought, crop yields don't increase and you're less secure against bad weather and rising costs. What about when the taxes go up to 35%? Now you can't feed your family because you've got less than two acres for yourself. You dip into savings or you take hand-outs or you give-up farming.
But that's not how it works, you say. The government taxes income for individuals and profits for businesses. Taxing income is just like taking 25% of the farmer's crop instead of 25% of the farmer's profits. Your work isn't profit. It's time and effort that belongs to you and there's no provision for the government to have any right to it. When taxes are too high, the economy suffers and eventually suffocates. Government can't grow the economy, It can only get out of the way to let the economy grow. This means that the government can't really help you. Every benefit you get means we all lose something greater and we sacrifice future growth.
Not to put a damper on all of the AI / Singularity frenzy, but one of the big unsolved problems of the future is the inefficiency of artificial systems. Bio systems have evolved over millennia in constant competition for resources. Natural systems make the most use out of the available matter and energy. Manufactured systems have a life cycle that is many orders of magnitude less efficient than bio systems. They use exotic materials in industrial processes that are energy intensive. Imagine being a creature that relies on large amounts of Indium, Gallium and Arsenic, megawatts of energy and so many exotic chemicals to repair one's self and to reproduce. Our current technology just isn't near close enough for an explosion of AI machines. Without reproduction, these machines are unlikely to spread beyond the solar system in numbers that will make them easily visible to SETI. That means that biological intelligence has the potential for a long history ahead.
Slashdot Mirror
How about the government just stops using networks. It's not like they're doing anything productive right now anyhow.
In the united states there are several layers of laws that apply: International, Federal, State, County, City. Each layer is composed of written, common and case law. Additionally, there are at least four layers of regulation that can affect your actions as well religious and cultural norms. Just because the federal government isn't allowed to restrict some act, doesn't even come close to giving you the right to do it. In fact, if any one organizational layer was allowed to override all the others, we would live in a much less viable society.
Is it stupid because it's true and horrifyingly bad or stupid because it doesn't fit into your world of ignorance?
True cost of bailouts: over $12 Trillion.
Wall St. has the most highly privileged position of any industry in the world (including defense contractors and oil companies) and we all pay to keep them from being exposed to market forces of any real substance. They collectively have control over the mechanisms of corporate commerce and the whole money supply. You think that this conglomeration of power is somehow benign or beneficial to you?
Do you think that just because Wall St. is reporting good corporate profits and banks are lending a little money here and there that the real economy is somehow on track? Unemployment is still terribly high, taxes on most of us are higher than ever and climbing and so is public debt. Real incomes for most Americans and Europeans are falling or stagnant. Trillions of dollars were misspent on ridiculously overpriced housing and the asset base of the middle class has been eviscerated.
The sad thing is that most people are never going to wake up to the reality that taxes come in many forms. It's not just what you pay to the IRS and the states. You pay by inflation. You pay by being forced to buy myriad overpriced goods and services (healthcare, banking, insurance, food, energy, housing, drugs ...) which are offered in markets that are heavily tilted by regulation and subsidy. You pay when your family and friends go off to fight and die in unjust, illegal wars to further the interests of the profiteers. And you're not just paying for the services you get. You're paying for wars on drugs. You're paying for corporate welfare. You're paying for the biggest prison industry and the biggest military industry in the history of the world.
So yeah, keep telling the rest of us how stupid we are for making the connections. Don't worry. The economy and government are big and complicated. Keep telling yourself that no one interest or group has enough leverage to push the whole thing in their favor, or that all the little levers pushed by the rich players aren't tilting the whole thing over into an unsustainable landslide that could, and probably will end in catastrophe.
Let me tell you that it's not some giant conspiracy. It's just some rich people looking to protect their assets. They push a little here, they get a little richer. They get more power to push a little harder and over the years, and the layers of corruption get deeper. The harbors of safety for the top players become institutionalized. Every generation of elites pushes a little harder to grow their fortunes and consolidate their advantages. Look at one of the symptoms: big complex tax codes. Another symptom: Banks too big to fail dictating their own regulations.
It doesn't require a huge amount of greed or evil by any one party. It's just the rich and powerful people saying to themselves, "I'm rich because I work hard and I'm smarter than most of these other people and I'm going to use my advantage to make sure I stay rich by screwing the rest of them over just a little." When that happens millions of times for a few hundred years, it leads to what we've got today. A million "just a little" things turn into a big burden for the folks who play by the rules that others make.
I broke down and bought a Mac Mini after about a month of unsuccessfully trying to get OSX Hackintoshed to be stable on my various PCs. I want to develop iPad/iPhone apps and thats really the only way to do it without some kind of compromise. Unfortunately, it now also costs $5 to buy XCode on the Mac App Store (previously a free download), unless you pay the $100/year for an IOS development license (which I'm not going to do until I'm ready to ship something). If $5 gets Apple to make XCode a more professional tool, I'm all for it, but I suspect this will not be the case. I also have doubts that Apple will completely wall-off the Mac. People get a lot of value from free utilities, etc., that they download from the web. Forcing all those utilities into the Mac App Store would also force the authors into proprietary models and probably into paying the $100/year dev license. In a lot of ways it would emaciate the Mac software "ecosystem" and end up deteriorating the value of the platform. I think Apple would be happy to just get fees for brokering almost all of the paid Mac apps by making the Mac App Store the avenue of choice for buying Mac software. I can also see how it might be good for developers of free apps. Download the free version on a website or pay $1 for the supported version via the M.A.S.
On the other hand, it's a much more reasonable price than, e.g., Visual Studio 2010 Pro ($650+). I just don't understand how Microsoft can swing from ~$250 for VS 2008 Standard and then $550 for the upgrade to 2010 or $650 for the full product. VS is much higher quality than XCode, but the pricing difference is outrageous. But, looking at Microsoft's whole lineup, nothing is priced reasonably. At least with Mac hardware, I'm getting something that is well-made and is priced in the ballpark of what's reasonable (Yes, I'm looking at you, Visio Pro 2010!). Enough bitching. Back to work.
Your clarification could use some corrections as well. AQ (terrorists herein described as AQ for purposes of simplification) was in Iraq for a time. The tide turned in the surge mainly due to the actions of the local militias. Granted, we bribed and strong-armed them onto action, but mainly they were getting really sick of the foreigners destroying their lives and afraid of the kind of indiscriminate killing that our surge numbers would produce. They drove out and killed most of the foreigners because they can tell the difference and we largely can't. Now they're having a quiet civil war that is just barely kept in check by our presence. The populace wants us out so they can move on with winning or losing and the politicians we've backed want us to stay so they don't get slaughtered by the next strong-man to emerge when we leave. What we can claim to have done is initiate a war based on false pretenses that attracted AQ there. Once there, we attacked terrorists and anyone else with a weapon in-hand. In the process, over a million locals have been killed (not just Iraqis, because a significant minority were foreigners) and the society has been pretty much turned inside-out. Hardly anyone would say that Iraq is more stable and less friendly to terrorism than before we invaded.
Afghanistan has hardly been a more successful campaign. It's now the number one opium growing region in the world. We and our proxies are in active negotiation to re-establish the Taliban as part of the power bloc controlling the region so that we may leave without looking like the cause of another civil war there, which will almost inevitably lead to regional powers that are friendly to AQ. I say region, because Afghanistan cannot properly be called a country in the way we think of it. It's a conglomeration of tribes that share some allegiance to regional authorities which sometimes broker relations with the outside world. We treat it as a state because we had to attack it and on a political level we have no understanding of a non-state entity.
Finally: Iran now has more influence over both of their neighbors than before. We did kill Bin Laden and a bunch of other terrorists. It has so far cost the lives of over 7,000 U.S. soldiers, 32,000 U.S. wounded, probably a million+ civilians and over a trillion dollars.
You mentioned that the airport security response is in the right direction, but largely bungled. I would argue that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the same scenario. Response in the right direction but costing so many lives and dollars at a scale so large that we just don't comprehend the tragedy. Yes, we should attack and kill terrorists. We should support democracy over tyranny. The reality is that we support tyranny because it's easier to deal with one client than a few million who are not as easily bought-off. If we stop supporting dictators, a lot of the fuel for the fire of terrorism will be removed and we won't have to go to war in the process.
Schools should do what keeps them in business. If someone is going to pay them to subsidize expensive STEM education, that's what will keep them going, so they should run with that. Without subsidy, they should charge according to costs, since running the program at a loss makes no economic sense and will just lead to them closing their doors.
Why don't we have more US citizen STEM majors and STEM students going into industry? Because people who have citizenship and speak US English fluently are also likely to know the score: you make much more money working for financial manipulators than for productive industry. Foreigners often don't know the score, or they have a harder time swimming in the culture of the business sharks. They go to industry jobs because they are able to get them, don't know any better and anyway industry jobs are a huge improvement over the crap they put up with in the 3rd world. Then there's the people who just love doing it and wouldn't sacrifice their passion just for money. I guess. Those people are, as expected, pretty rare.
Want to make the US competitive, r.e. high tech industry? Want to avoid pitfalls like raising STEM education prices? Fix business climate. Let me say right now that it's just not going to happen before a truly major catastrophe hits us. Wall St. owns the gov't and hasn't suffered at all in comparison to the rest of the nation for the crisis they created. Anyhow, here's a short list of things to fix:
* Remove or short-circuit the political influence of the controlling elite. Their interests normally align well enough with society to allow them the privilege of their economic and political advantages. This is no longer the case. They're now eating our lunches so fast that the real economy is shrinking and they don't realize that they're going to eventually have things much harder when they aren't leeching off a fat and growing middle class but a poor and hollowed-out one.
* Stop externalizing all non-monetary costs. Foreign outsourcing is profitable for the elite and terrible for the society. Destroying the ecology by ruthlessly sucking out natural resources is fantastically profitable. So is keeping dehumanized workers hard under the thumb of management. This single item addresses so many problems that we face, it's not even funny. Almost all economics research should be directed at properly measuring the real costs and benefits of economic activity and giving us the tools to properly decide what to pursue.
* End corporate personhood. Corporations exist as vehicles for accumulations capital and resources to survive changes in management and ownership. The incentives for all parties involved is so far tilted to the short-term that it is really just a mandate to slash, burn, rape and pillage by any legal (or otherwise) means necessary. Personhood rewards this behavior with both unfair advantages and immortality.
* Adjunct the single corporate mandate of profit-seeking with the proper mandate that each corporation has a net benefit to society (including non-monetary costs).
* Demolish regulation and lawyer-strangulation in health-care and replace it with a highly visible system of certification. Make the patient pay for his services and let him decide what he's going to buy. Right now we're all forced to buy health care in the form of Cadillacs. Services have an enormous burden of administration and regulation. There are no health-care pintos. If the huge regulatory and insurance burden is removed and Sally the nurse can treat everyday injuries and colds out of her house or her van without two hired paperwork shufflers to make her legal, then her competition will reduce costs because the Caddy dealership doctors and hospitals will have to compete to survive. You really shouldn't be able to sue your caregivers. They're human and they're going to make mistakes. The key is to focus on making those mistakes both rare and less costly for you and for them. Modern medicine CAN do wonderful things but the ex
Evolution causes mother nature to be very efficient in her selection of characteristics. It might just be that green is useful to plants because it is the right wavelength for efficient photosynthesis with the sun's light. It might be green because it's much easier for plants to make green chloroplasts than other colors or because green imparts enough energy without overheating the leaf structure or its easier for plants to repair green proteins than other colors. If you read up on it a bit, you find out that green does not really maximize energy production, but it's apparently optimal for most plants. However, there's plenty of earth plants that aren't green! Surprisingly there's few black plants. We think too often about optimizing a single parameter. Usually that parameter is short term cash flow. The natural world is a more-or-less true form of capitalism and it's brutal but it shows us that short-term gain isn't the only thing worth maximizing and in nature there's no way to externalize costs for the long-term. Those that do, don't survive.
Google's main task is to determine what pages best relate to a given set of key words and what ads best fit a given page. Since the service is so valuable, people are always trying to game it. If it wants to use genetic algorithms or some form of self-improvement on its search function, it's important to penalize algorithms which give the SEO gamers' pages too much weight in search results. That penalty would be measured by regret.
A corporation's only mandate is to make money. Microsoft doesn't poison wells or denude wetlands to make its money, but it's not estranged from all of the immoral-though-legal acts that every rich bastard makes use of to work the system. It's not a proud thing to be the most honest of all thieves.
pbxes.org is just not reliable enough. In my experience it goes down at least once a month. It's also highly technical and at some point you just want to stop worrying about the technical details and make and receive calls without hassles. You might as well run asterisk on your own server or on a VPS. Also, Google Voice, while having a fantastic interface and good reliability, introduces an often unacceptable latency into phone conversations. My co-workers and I have tried paid alternatives to GV, such as phone.com. The latency issue is similar, though voice quality and consistency is somewhat better. My own solution, for now, is to use AT&T on my phone when I'm roaming about the world and use Callcentric (callcentric.com) for VOIP service if AT&T coverage is weak and I have WI-FI available (e.g. in my home office). The disadvantage is, of course, that you have multiple phone numbers and it's sometimes confusing for people who are used to you calling from one number. I still use GV for voicemail but not for calling (programmed AT&T to forward voicemail to my google number). This is not a simple approach and it's not what you're looking for but it's what works right now. VOIP on cell phones (and in general, really) is still not mature enough so that it's always easy for any device to work perfectly with any service. I have a few software VOIP clients on my phone. I prefer Acrobits Softphone and Bria Softphone apps on my iPhone. I also have Skype. It's annoying enough for me to avoid it most of the time. Having run my phone on both AT&T and on TMobile's networks, I can tell you that it's not that feasible to do VOIP over GSM with either carrier on the iPhone. It may be feasible with Sprint/Clearwire and a different phone, but I'm not that interested in trying. My suggestion, if you're going to do 4G wireless is to just use a VOIP carrier like Callcentric with your data plan. However, I have doubts that the latency and reliability will be adequate. Good luck.
By the way, I came to this conclusion by starting out with an iPod touch and VOIP software, moving to a 3GS with VOIP software (hacked to use the iPad data plan ($15/mo)). Eventually settling on the current iPhone 4 + pretty cheap VOIP (less than $5/mo). Yes I could go Android but I don't like the phones. Yes I could go Verizon but I want voice+data at the same time. Yes I could go Sprint but their service isn't really superior to AT&T in my area and, for me, the jailbroken iPhone beats the EVO (although it's the best Android phone for my money).
Your idea is a gaming geeks dream and a business manager's nightmare. Consoles are popular for consumers, publishers and developers because they offer standardized, large market platforms for the game products. Games cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. You have to amortize that cost over a lot of copies. Third party publishers can afford to put new games on two of three console platforms because it makes sense to add 25% to the production effort to net a 33% increase in potential market. With the PC market, with all the crazy available configurations, it makes no sense to add 50% or more effort and net a 10 to 20% gain in potential customers. That's why the AAA titles strongly prefer consoles over PCs. Once someone figures out how to truely standardize the programming interface for games on the PC, it will be nearly as popular as consoles. The guys at Valve have figured this out, though they haven't really made the huge commitment to making it happen full scale. They are making a ton of money with their limited goals of reducing the cost of distribution and marketing. OnLive is another concern that is headed in exactly the same direction with a much different means of getting there. The potential is there to make billions but the hurdles are still huge.
The truth is that graphics and AI are not the be-all, end-all of gaming experience. World of Warcraft and Starcraft are brilliant examples of games with cartoony, par-level graphics that could be adapted to the current gen. of consoles. Neither game is meant to be played without a keyboard, but they're brilliant, hugely popular games that work because they have excellent gameplay, not over-the-top graphics, AI, physics, etc. Angry Birds is another example of a universally popular game that requires no huge graphics, sound or high-power processing to make it fantastically fun. Fun always trumps glitz. Always.
It's much more fun to pop in a game and play than to pop in a disc, install it, click a million times, agree to terms, input a code, update drivers, turn off antivirus, reboot and wait for long long load times than it is to just relax on the couch and play the stupid game. PCs do have inherent advantages over consoles in the input and processing power departments but the setup, maintenance and support disadvantages make all but the highest-quality, best funded publishers shrink from attempting to build and continue AAA franchises on the PC platform. It makes much more sense to do low-tech, low investment stuff on the PC.
All that said, I vastly prefer the PC because smarter, more complex, more involved games show up there due to the superiority of mouse-and-keyboard input. Next favorite platform is my phone. The only times I have regretted not having a console are when I read about Red Dead Redemption and Heavy Rain. But there's no way I'm buying each console to play two games.
Get a bus ticket. Stay in a cheap motel or a hostel. You can afford this. Meeting people is always worth it if you do a small amount of work to maintain your connections. Why pass up an opportunity in this economy?
>> Companies like Sony have no choice but to do whatever they can in order to make money for their shareholders..
It's not their fault for being evil. They were made that way. We should let them screw us. It's just how they do things.
China has set its tariffs, exchange rates, rules and standards to tilt the game in favor of employing Chinese labor for producing manufactured goods and for making exporters selling to China pay to compete. We aren't doing that. We protect the big native industries like agriculture which have real political clout and can't be outsourced and we consciously knock down any and all barriers to outsourcing our manufacturing because this feeds the bottom line of multinational manufacturers (in the short term).
By the way, those big Ag. industries also employ hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, which keeps their costs down. This also is intentional. It's why we don't have real immigration reform. We have huge oil subsidies and expensive health care because all of the laws are written to make profits flow up. It's not a conspiracy. It's just a reflection of the fact that money naturally concentrates at the top and it is so easy to buy the type of legislation (or lack thereof) that can distort markets and help the money keep flowing up. Add in the hidden tax of inflation on everyone, the enormous tax on investors of the privileged super-connected Wall Streeters and the huge money sink that is the military-industrial complex and it's fairly easy to see that we're vacuuming cash out of the politically powerless middle and lower classes into the pockets of the politically connected upper class. All of the economic data of the last 30 years supports this. The richest 10% owns over half of all assets. Working class wages have fallen down a hill for the past 35 years (especially when you count that we've nearly doubled the available labor pool by putting women to work!). Our standard of living has fallen while our personal, government and corporate debts have ballooned. Big business thrives by setting the rules in favor of itself and against the smaller up-and-comers.
I used to believe that this just wasn't the case. I used to believe 100% in the unregulated free market. Perhaps I still do, but the reality today is that we're regulating and lawyering ourselves into oblivion. To get back to the original point: if we hadn't spent the last 30 years outrageously inflating the cost of our own labor (see all the reasons above) and knocking down every obstacle to outsourcing it abroad, our stores would be more than half-full with goods that are made in USA. Even with all the ridiculous overhead that we've imposed on ourselves, US labor isn't completely uncompetitive. We have more skilled workers than anywhere in the world. If the cost of healthcare for employees were to be cut from 17% of GDP to the perfectly adequate 7%; if we didn't pay outrageous insurance rates at every turn because of a legal system gone mad; if we didn't have huge unnecessary tax rates to pay for ridiculous military boondoggles, big industry subsidies and misguided regulation; if we didn't spend so much money just in transaction costs and debt maintenance imposed by Wall Street leeches, we'd have much cheaper labor and capital. We'd have competitive labor and capital. All of these things are costs in and of themselves and they compound each other.
Give me a break? You buy this drivel? You just made the case that because our system is set-up to externalize as many costs as possible in favor of short-term profit, it must be OK. So goes the thinking of the rest of the idiots who have driven the economy off a cliff: "It's not illegal, so it must be OK." In the technology world, we have an entire industry dedicated to figuring out the impact of technological change on society and the human implications of that change. It's called Science Fiction. We think about what could happen; what could go wrong; what could go right and we write millions of stories about it. Of course many of these stories are unrealistic, but they're interesting and many have a kernel of truth. It plants seeds in our minds and we start to think about the implications of things like unfettered AI, bioengineering, nuclear arms and the expansion of humanity into new worlds where we are divided by vast chasms of time, space, environment and genetics. I'm not saying that we're somehow more moral or more responsible because Sci Fi exists. However, we have a clue and our awareness is heightened and we aren't completely blind to our own collective destiny. We do what we do because at some level we love it. Maybe the investment bankers and CEOs of the world love what they do too, but since the stakes are so high, the more likely motivating factor is just plain greed. There is no room for self-reflection in avaricious minds.
China is not an evil empire. But it has shown a tendency to systematically suppress the lives of the lower classes in favor of the ruling classes for thousands of years. There's little evidence that this is different today. So many of the values we claim to hold dear are antithetical to their way of life. Read, for instance, stories about Chinese Mothering to see where the individual is repressed to favor some other goal of more immediate and concrete utility. If mothers are forcing their wills relentlessly on their children all over China, what lessons does the Chinese ruling class take to it's job of governing and use of its increasing power? Since most of us aren't in the ruling class, we have a lot to lose if they become the next hegemony.
It's taken a lot of hard, expensive work and lives were lost in developing the technologies that gave us the edge to "win" the cold war. Now we're bartering this long-term advantage for some short-term profits? And you say this is justified? I see this as a sign that we're circling the drain. Our grandparents' generation would recognize this for what it is: Treason.
First of all, it’s not useful to dismiss this guy because he’s not a climatologist. As an R&D engineer who works with everyone from technicians to theoretical physicists and mathematicians, I can tell you that the biggest difference between equally talented minds is not in the job they do, but the mindset of the person doing the work. There are plenty of theoretical engineers and practical physicists. Titles don't really have as much meaning as we tend to give them when it comes to the credibility of a source.
Secondly, I would argue that there are many, many hard problems that we must deal with as a society this century. They include (in no particular order):
I’m sure I’m missing some important ones. These are just generalized root causes that give rise to many particular problems such as the historically-high potential for, and ongoing cost of disease epidemics (e.g. AIDS, malaria), due to population density and the mis-allocation of wealth.
We are living in a small, dense, interconnected world where economic borders are vanishing for the wealthy but growing for the poor and middle classes. We have to confront these problems not as nations but as a whole human society. We’re nowhere near that level of integration, but big social and technological changes can happen quickly, which can drive big economic and political changes.
The cost of dealing with climate change is enormous. It’s greater than several years of worldwide economic output. This points to the fact that to best deal with the problems we confront, we’re going to have to balance costs and benefits. We have to live in the real world and prioritize our goals.
I, personally, doubt that we will survive the next century without incurring massive disastrous losses, perhaps catastrophic losses (Disaster is when a large-scale failure occurs. Catastrophe is when failures result in large-scale losses of life). I won’t go as far as saying that all civilization will end. But I believe that billions of lives will be lost and tens of billions more will be oppressed unnecessarily due to our own lack of coordination and abundance of short-sightedness.
The bottom line is that I don’t think that solving the climate change problem is either practical or desirable as a goal by itself in the context of the many other problems which are of greater consequence. These problems must be dealt-with in concert rather than individually if we have a hope of avoiding catastrophe.
Finally, I will say that the complexity argument is not hollow. I have not seen evidence that climate is a less chaotic system than weather. By their nature, chaotic systems cannot be modeled beyond a short horizon. In climatology 100 years is indeed a short horizon, but these models are also supposed to make a lot of predictions which don’t seem to be verifiable except by waiting. Running the models with varied inputs and seeing a statistical convergence doesn’t prove that they model reality, only that the models produce convergent results. Running them backwards doesn’t really produce meaningful results either. We have constructed useful weather models by testing them aga
When everyone buys index funds, the index managers have huge leverage to manipulate. The high freq traders have more leverage to manipulate the fund traders. The market as a whole becomes more correlated. There's nothing wrong with index investing, but if everyone does a lot of index investing, at some point you are looking into a pricing hall of mirrors instead of a working market and it takes fewer and smaller non-conforming players get enough leverage to tilt the whole applecart. We already see the effects of this from the studies that show that the markets are now more correlated than before the popularity of the index funds.
If you want to limit the effects of rogue players, don't just ignore them. Prohibit their abuses. The 5-second trade granularity mentioned above seems like a good start.
I'm not usually one to spout the standard talking points but:
1) All the harm caused by the leaks was theoretical. Not one person or operation has been shown to be harmed by this leak in any real way.
2) Whereas actual corruption, destruction and death on a massive scale have been caused by the interminable Afghan and Iraqi wars that have been prosecuted badly and under false pretenses and with a constant cover of official lies and minimal scrutiny by mainstream media.
I hope Palin truly is unelectable. She has no understanding of anything beyond how to present the rhetoric handed to her by her handlers and act the part of a figurehead. Here's to hoping that the worst damage she can do is as a lightning-rod and a distraction from the real issues. Lord help us if she gets and keeps any official power.
Some of the movies that would seem to benefit most from 3D, don't work out in practice. Kids movies would be obvious winners here, but last time I took my 4-year-old nephew to see a 3D movie we had to leave early because the glasses didn't fit his head. When they keep falling off, you can't watch the movie and when you don't have them on, it's mostly just a blur. We got our money back. Avatar was pretty good in 3D/IMAX, though I'm not sure it wouldn't be just as good in just IMAX.
Increasingly, I'd just like to vote for no one. We can just fire the incumbent and leave the position vacant. It's time to down-size. Let the senate nominate some key positions such as secretary of state. Let the people vote directly on the budget electronically. It's time to start lopping off the cancerous tentacles of the leviathan.
Here's why the odds-makers are wrong: They assume that the people at the UN know something. As in anything at all. It's just the opposite.
There's not going to be a jobs recovery. A huge big chunk of our economy was dedicated to developing real estate and financing the sale of that development. The value of real estate is just not coming back for decades. Those jobs are permanently gone, just like the textile jobs of yore. There are no replacements in services or in manufacturing. Our technology edge is eroding and as it vanishes, so too will the production of the remaining expensive manufactured goods that we make here.
Gold ATMs are not useful except in the most dire emergencies. If you need to use one, it's already too late. No one is going to sell gold in the midst of a currency crisis. These things exist to take advantage of the fool. The reason they will make money is that even a fool can see that there is a crisis coming, while very few have any good plan for dealing with it.
Lets put this in simple terms. Imagine you're a farmer with 30 acres. It takes 20 acres to feed your family. 66% of the crop takes care of your immediate needs and 33% goes to savings and taxes. At a rate of 25%, the government takes 1/4 of your crop and you have 9% for savings. The government is having a bad year and decides to raise taxes. The rate is going up from 25% to 30%. No problem, you say. That leaves 3.3% of what you farm as a buffer to sell and use for savings. Last year you saved your profits to eventually invest in new equipment that will increase your yields by 25%. You can't buy that equipment this year because you won't have enough savings. The economy doesn't grow. Equipment doesn't get bought, crop yields don't increase and you're less secure against bad weather and rising costs. What about when the taxes go up to 35%? Now you can't feed your family because you've got less than two acres for yourself. You dip into savings or you take hand-outs or you give-up farming. But that's not how it works, you say. The government taxes income for individuals and profits for businesses. Taxing income is just like taking 25% of the farmer's crop instead of 25% of the farmer's profits. Your work isn't profit. It's time and effort that belongs to you and there's no provision for the government to have any right to it. When taxes are too high, the economy suffers and eventually suffocates. Government can't grow the economy, It can only get out of the way to let the economy grow. This means that the government can't really help you. Every benefit you get means we all lose something greater and we sacrifice future growth.
Most parents love their children and a lot don't use their authority wisely. Do your authorities, ne masters, love you?
Not to put a damper on all of the AI / Singularity frenzy, but one of the big unsolved problems of the future is the inefficiency of artificial systems. Bio systems have evolved over millennia in constant competition for resources. Natural systems make the most use out of the available matter and energy. Manufactured systems have a life cycle that is many orders of magnitude less efficient than bio systems. They use exotic materials in industrial processes that are energy intensive. Imagine being a creature that relies on large amounts of Indium, Gallium and Arsenic, megawatts of energy and so many exotic chemicals to repair one's self and to reproduce. Our current technology just isn't near close enough for an explosion of AI machines. Without reproduction, these machines are unlikely to spread beyond the solar system in numbers that will make them easily visible to SETI. That means that biological intelligence has the potential for a long history ahead.