Americans seem to be somewhat blind about abuse of power by the wealthy, the abuse of power that money brings. People in Europe have a more sanguine attitude towards the relationship of wealth to power, which is one reason trade unions are still more powerful in Europe than in the U.S. Americans have a much less critical relationship towards "getting ahead" and economic growth and development than they should. The lopsided income distribution is beginning to take its toll on the belief Americans have in fairness, that others really respect their needs and are reasonably fair about it. Fairness in conduct is a big part of the stability of the American system and the current economic order and its political results are being seen as increasingly unfair. This is bound to result in trouble. I live in Silicon Valley in California and the effects are already being seen in an overcrowded real estate market that is driving renters out of their homes. The perception is rapidly emerging that our political representatives have so bought into the promotion of business that they do not understand its problems and that investors who drive the growth of jobs do not care if what benefits a few techies hurts the interests of a majority and of people who were born and raised here.
This is probably going to have more and more bad effects unless people here reassesss their assumptions about economics and growth, and this becomes a direct political challenge to both major parties and to the wealthy who have been able to placate some by "Giving Back" which is tokenism, a tiny percentage of the cost to the great majority in society. It looks like we may have been better off if Rick Perry had actually gotten his wish and some of those companies had moved to Austin and Huston Texas. More than likely, the people in Texas would have learned a lesson their politics blinds them and many other Americans to, that growth is not always a good thing, that it eeds to be controlled and planned and that the selfish motives of investors and plutocrats is not enough wisdom to preserve balance or fairness in society, and although they might get away with it for a time, but sooner than later it will have some unpleasent reprocussion.
On this note, Phil Mattier, who I think is a notorious Right Winger, Pro Business Republican advocate at KPIX CBS/Ch 5 in San Francisco ran a piece yesterday about how the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was behind the protests against Google and Twitter downtown, including the obstruction of the Google buses that take Google employees, who are driving prices up in San Francisco, to commute down to jobs in Mountaon View. He gave the story as if it were some great news flash of a conspiracy between unions and the protests. This would hardly phase people elsewhere in the world but it runs big here because Americans have this delusion that to resist the will of business people is unpatriotic, Communist, and subversive. I suppose that after Ronald Reagan busted the flight controllers union in 1982 that the promoters of a wide open labor pool controlled by employers is a universal good, it is not. The reaction against Silicon Valley business is likely to get worse before it imporves, and that will have been deserved.
Are you kidding? You pick your arguments carefully, and very selectively. Would you base your judgement that it is safe for you to go outside and walk the streets of your neighborhood based on the income distribution of your fellow citizens? Your safety might be directly related to how much real earning power a significant number of them gained or lost, rather than some abstraction about incentives. Given that people are not logical or rational, the perception that their lot has declined over all might figure in their temptation to commit crime, property crime especially. It is all about perceptions not accounting. That is why economics cannot be science. Everything adds up when people behave in predictable fashion, but numbers go haywire when models break down and then historical processes that tend to destroy wealth take over.
This is part of a bigger problem. Who really benefits from the tax code? It isn't you and I, who have a W-2 and maybe a couple of 1099 or K2 income reports. It is the business guys who got Congress to create all that complexity to allow them for many exemptions you and I can't find let alone use. So Intuit trying to protect its business model that relies on the complexity of the 1040 and itemized deductions is just a side-effect of the overall complexity and exemptions for special interests,
businesses, mostly to have their burden reduced. And they get that because they can go to Congress, can buy members of Congress or pay to have access to them and ask for and get favors. So a complex tax code as well as complex filing favors the powerful and the wealthy, as does a flat tax, as well.
We still need a progressive income tax, because the rich get more of a break from a flat tax than do low to moderate wadge earners, but the process could be much simpler for most people. That is disfavors Intuit is too bud, but tough, the Congress should not be asked to support a private firm's business model for no other good reason. that is no different tan if you or I defrauded the government.
On, NO, they found a serious bug in a FOSS package, Oh NO, the proprietary fanboys are saying that the Sky is Falling! Meanwhile, a fix comes out on the day that the advisory is issued and the patch to the library is on several repositories that day. On April 7, the day of the CERT, Debian had a patch to the openssl livrary.
Oh, I don't know if there is a strong case for collusion, after all if A charges 30% extra than copy cat by B and C doesn't require much imagination or planning, especially if B and C think that consumers will pay the tax. The minute you start thinking that you can evade the tax and that you don't have to buy into a captive market, then you look at it differently.You don't use Google Doc or Google Drive because you can see that the products are all about locking you in, regardless if they are based on Open Source, and violate its intent. You don't use HTML and Word-like formats under closed subsets of open standards by Google, and you use other more powerful open standards like LaTex and thumb you nose at Google.
This removes one of the arguments for Windows, that even though new versions create problems, M$ would try to patch them fairly quickly and make the upgrade step fairly painless. Now, they aren't even trying to do that, and the ever present security holes are still there. So can M$ be long for this world. It may be that suddenly M$ is failing as a company and may capitulate to the dominance of open source alternatives, even though that exposes users to more complexity?
In spite of the piss war that goes on over updating commands, and the different approaches in Linux, the update complexity is no worse than it would be with any multiple sourced set of updates and it is possible to hide most of the complexity behind a simple GUI interface, just as it isn't necessary to expose users to command line complexity. How many Mac user's have ever opened Terminal? You and I who know the shell and know the command line want the complexity because it gives us fine control and especially when we encounter a problem we can hope to troubleshoot and fix it ourselves. It took until Windows Vista to bring its users anywhere near to that level of information to be able to troubleshoot their problems with any comparable transparency as grepping through a UNIX log file and issuing commands from the shell proactively as every UNIX sysadmin has been able to do for decades. So, the future is just different. It may be that if M$ survives, which it might not, that OSs end up looking more like Linux and that users will have to develop a different set of habits. How can that be any worse than using Android or OS X or other UNIX derived OS?
Of course most of the driver problems, i.e. Nvidia, have to do with the binary being closed source and with the vendor being coerced to provide a driver against their business plan to remain closed source while operating in an open sourced environment, I hear you Richard Stalman. Most of the Linux install problems have to do with closed hardware designed for Windows systems.
People get this wrong all the time because the old idea was that most of what you know comes from your training as an apprentice. That can no longer be true because technology is changing so fast. In fact it is more valuable to learn how to learn. That is something a particular form of higher education can help you do. It can train you with thinking and critical skills that guide you to new knowledge. In a way it is almost as if the kind of skills that were taught in Plato's Academy, updated of course, are more important now than ever before. People with no formal education are easy to spot in this standard. They have gaps in their knowledge that are hard to explain logically, and the remedy for that seems to have been a bout in a "sophomoric" debating society. That exercises the mental muscle and challenges the beast of prejudice in a way that an informal or vocationally directed training does not. This shows in the prevalence of crack-pot or pseudoscience ideas in engineers, especially. The electrical engineering people I have known over the years seem particularly prone to bizarre beliefs. The reason for this seems to be the specialization of education and the gaps in their training. People who train in more traditional sciences and especially those who get to experience research learn much more how to think generally, techniques like suspending judgement and a bull-shit detector are great teachers.
What this subject seems to be about really is that some people are "Tools", that is functionaries inside organizations whose self-appointed role is to enforce the status quo. You know the types, these are the guys who make sweeping generalization and give pat arguments based on business or finance as though they are in charge. They may be revealing their own uncreativeness or defending their holding against competition by telling everyone else what not to do, give "advice" which is really negative and self-serving. They may actually be enforcing elitist or insider practices that actively discourage competition.
To the point of the OP, this may be one of those efforts as misinformation made by someone with a hidden (financial) agenda, to get people cheaper than possible if they presented a college diploma. What is of little doubt is that what can be learned of a subject like "coding" is open ended and that a good formal training in subjects like algorithem design and performance is of obvious value, if not always a requirement of the task at hand, and that to be able to know of when formal topics are important is of great value. The issue boils down to what someone wants to pay you for, to be a compliant underling, like all the "Tools" that frequent these forums, or to pay you for that analytical skill that might be needed from time to rime.
It is a con game, you are describing. On the one hand employers, especially if they are run by financial people, always look to the bottom line and want to lure people in to work for as little as possible. They are concealing the fact that they want someone underqualified and underpaid that they can intimidate. If you work in such a place you are possibly a tool, if not evil. So, having to suggest suppressing your education is just a ruse to discourage people who might challenge authority by having sufficient critical skills to stand up to lies, and people who run most businesses are habitual liars anyway, and especially people in finance. These are repressive and uncreative people who are strangling the workforce and they will be purged, eventually. Maybe it will take a major war to reset priorities so that creative thinking is rewarded once again. The human condition arrives at virtue through its worse vices because what is lacking is more important to people than what you actually have. That is possibly a fatal flaw in our species.
You will undoubtedly assert the truth of your generalization, but they may as well be indicative of a sickness in your experience.
There is a way to look at this issue, by turning it on its head, especially given the political economics of the present. The core issue here may be that private business, relying on investment to operate, cannot create the jobs that might be needed. That is, what people want to do for a living. The point about going to university for academic reasons, i.e. intellectual interest in the subject, is fine, but even people who love a subject have to eventually support themselves and to do that their industry has to be supplied with investment and revenues that can support a decent wage. So, those who reverse the decision priorities and look at what disciplines pay more first may be wrong headed, but also if you made a decision about what interested you in 1970 or 1980 that it may not be well funded by now. That makes a case for following your heart instead of the market for jobs. It also says that a significant number of people do not have a strong sense of what to do with their lives. If you have a strong direction, the joy of doing the work will compensate for reduced compensation.
Maybe the weaknesses of market economics, especially as a world economic order, will retrain people especially in America, to be less interested in economic gain as a reward for their role in society and at the same time they will spend fewer hours working and be far less concerned with compensation and look to other rewards of having a role. The inefficiencies of the economics will cause this shift. Many desires are not funded by the economic system even though they are viable roles.
Notice that the core types 3 and 6 do not map directly, Modern mapping add traits of Type 6 Cowardice and Type 3 Deceit
and these can be seen as variants of the Sloth at point 9 since they are all sins of omission, not being available, not cmmitting to action
and not supporting truth.
I think that you are ignoring something. People in society must have a meaningful role of some sort to fulfill, and at least that role must justify their support, so the relentless march of technical change driven by engineers who have, in general, a very poor estimate of the largely unintended consequences, and by investors whose only incentive seems to be short-term gain, does not anticipate that idle hands DO make the devil's workshop, and not only in the sense that "work" is some manual or mental process, but that enough of it must exist and be funded so that opportunity is reasonable for most people. To create a situation where increasingly tiny elites benefit the most and where more and more others are marginalized is just asking for trouble. It is asking for major social and political upheaval, for violence and crime, for factionalism. What a very uneven income distribution does is to sow the seeds for elitism and fachism, for exploitative and exclusive right-wing elites, for srivivalist mentality and for class welfare. It signals the end of democratic politics and inclusive institutions. Much of what you take for granted as civil society becomes a luxery in a gated garden, a gated community.
Unplanned selfishness is not enough to prevent this detioriation, market economics does not assure inclusion or fairness, in fact it tends to lead to elitism especially if the general perception is that opportunity and resources are decreasing or being sequestered for the benefit of a minority or a self-appointed elite. This was why the off-the-record remark made by Mitt Romney in May of 2012 was so damaging to his run for President. He was revealed as an elitist.
History has a harsh treatment of uncaring elites and for societies that abandon most of their people. It purges the elites. There are times of external decline which favor elites, but any time where opportunity exists but is thwarted by entrenched interests results in those obstructions being swept aside. Whether it is business governence, finance, banking practices, entrenched institutions, special interests, or corrupt political and economic groups. they can be swept aside and quickly and often violently as well. There are some signs that a violent reaction to the status quo could be a result if compromises, wisdom, and solutions are not found for then challenges we face, even America is not immune for these reactions and may have been spared so far in its history by a sense of public duty and compromise in its leaders in government and business. That could change. We are now much more interdependent, the urge to go solo is now much more problematic, even Putin is going to learn that, Russia cannot be immune from the wrath of the rest of the world for acting in its own nationalist interest, nor can an American corporation acting it its own economic interest, be immune, as GM is discovering.
I was really saying that in America scientists are increasingly pressured by people they work for to self-censor their advice, to go light on warning alarms if they happen to work for an energy company or if they work for government agencies, i.e. NOAA, WRT climate change, and in the case of the geologic hazards to not be too alarmist in the face of politicians and cities who are trying to booster real estate values and business. Were geologists more effective against business interests in America then practices like allowing for older structures to not be up to earthquake codes, gradfathered against newer building codes that incorporate adjustments to seismic risk, would be less acceptable. In San Francisco Ca. there are about 1000 structures that could collapse in a M= 7.0 on the Hayward or San Andreas Faults which is a expected risk in the next 30 years or so.
The pressures are very high to suppress warnings about landslides in Washington state against the interests of real estate interests and city planning commissions, who often cater to developers, real estate agents, tax assessors, remembering that in America it is property taxes that support many local jurisidictions.
In the San Franciscio Bay Area the property values are over inflated as are the rents because demand far exceeds supply and there are no incentives to discourage investment in tech. I wonder how may of those people know that the over-priced property they own in San Francisco, increasingly owned by Asians, would be serverly damaged or destroyed in an expected quake.
The Loma Prieta quake of 1989 was not the worst case situation by a long shot. It was centered in about the most remote place it could have been on the active faults of the Bay Area, so even though it was an M = 7.1, a quake that size on the Hayward Fault in Berkeley would have a much bigger impact on people and property.
Funny thing about discrimination law is that it doesn't prevent discrimination, it merely trains people what not to say. The OP says that clearly. What would be illegal was implied but carefully never said explicitly, and it is hard to prove intent. I knew of a case many years ago where it looked like a line manager was choosing people to lay off who had used the company medical benefits, such costs come directly off the bottom line, but nothing was provable because no intent to do that was stated, meaning in public. The result is that the law is an aid to people who discriminate.
We are lucky that many people who lead like to be liked and almost worse than being fired outright is to be shamed. At least if the CEO has a disagreement with the board and the shareholders, he can rationalize that he did the best he could, but if he knows that according to his own standards he made a mistake or did wrong that he feels shame for it, then he may resign on his own accord. That is good. It levels the playing field between ordinary and powerful people.
Do any of you know the music in the OP? The key is G-major, and most of the music would be played on the higher pitched strings. It is not at all the same as, say, the middle movement of the Tschaikovsky Violin Concerto, the movement in B-Minor, so I wonder at the quality of the test, or what if they used Bach unaccompanied Sonatas and Partitas or Beethoven String Quartets?
One needs to judge the tone of each range, so music that exercises the G-string, especially the open G-string, the lowest note a violin can make, the G below Middle C, is as significant at what can be played on the top E-string.I would much rather here the Bach C-major Partita than the Beethoven Concerto.
Aside from the idea of an extranet, non-IP, more dynamically routed mesh network as an answer to non NN and snooping, there are other reasons to doubt that Facebook or Google will really take over the Internet. People make the mistake of thinking in terms of current technology and they assume wrongly that technology that might be new here in the U.S. in five years might not get adopted faster in new markets than here.
So the assumption has to be that the plans of Facebook and Google to bring the Internet to most of the rest of humanity and to do it in the captive market way they are infamous for is based on the assumption that the tool of choice is going to be the cheap ubiquitous smart phone, or even a cell-phone with 10X40 character display. How can I doubt this? Just today I posted a comment on Facebook's developer page suggesting that changes be allowed to their textarea widget rules, that they allow for Markdown and not be so ruthless about compressing out white space. The same issue applies to all of Google. Both companies are built around the Javascript textarea Widget and both companies are committed to keeping the mode of communication in that impoverished and frustrating form. What would really hurt both companies is for desktop screen resolutions to be made available from cell-phone form factored devices that use projected keyboards, these already exist, and projected full sized virtual displays that could be rendered by a laser or projected onto a flat surface. The restrictions FB and Google impose on Social Media use of the testarea widget would no longer be relavent, except for the simple data mining application, and the opportunity would exist for a third party to steal away their market share by offering a full editing interface, return to the desktop way of using the Internet. One of the smartphone makers could easily make this innovation and we would be free of artificial restrictions.
But of course deregulation or no regulation contains a conundrum. The ISPs and others can selectively throttle connections, making net neutrality moot anyway. The issue here is that unregulated monopolies can abuse access of their customers with no regulation, and that groups of companies in a cartel can abuse access of their customers with regulation. This becomes a problem of defeating those who manipulate access, either by taking away their market or by attacking their relationship with regulators. People are people. The worst urges of people in business and those in government are somewhat the same, the main difference being that what government power mongers do is a bit easier to uncover than what goes on in most businesses. It may be easier to look for alternative networking technology that does not have static single points of control, like having the backbone of the Internet passing through NSA HQ, then to fix a system that has attracted the attention of power and greed.
Has this one got off on a wrong footing, or is it that conversations where most of the people who post have nothing knowledgable to say head off to some state of lowest energy, a Ground State, where all topics decay into political and religious memed canned arguments?
Were it not for Dark Matter the OP would seem more relevant five or ten years ago than it does now. Given that it is now thought that matter as we know it, matter that interactls via Maxwell's Laws, is not the main mass constituant in the Universe, that the relationship of Dark Matter to cosmology is a tad more important than the lack of symmetry between matter and antimatter. The OP could have come from a time wrap, although I know that there are still important issues about symmerty breaking events in the early history of our Universe.
So there is good confidence that Dark Matter exists, but we don't know yet what it is, galaxy clusters and galaxy dynamics behaves as though matter. that has gravity but otherwise does not interact with the visible matter, can model how what is visible is moving. Here computers are key tools in the argument. I should say that it might be more important for us to pay attention to what Dark Matter might be.
Free Will is a Rationalist Christian invention and a lie. I suspect that most authoritarian Christians really dislike psychology because it argues that most human behavior is unconscious and not rational. The idea behind Christian Free Will is that God has laid down his law and you have the choice to obey it or not. That is authoritarian and not related at all to what modern findings say about how people form ideas based on preconditioning, and most of it happening unconsciously before awareness. Aware ideas and arguments are really ad hoc statements for pre-judgements, prejudice, and so the idea of Christian moral choice has to do with cultural conditioning of acceptable norms and not any rational analysis of moral issues.
In fact the way your religion works is to precondition decision making with norms that are established purely by appeal to force arguments saying that you will go to Hell if you don't accept their authority. This was disposed of by Spinoza in the 17th Century and it shows how backward American Protestants truly are.
Creationism, as an argument, is truely based on the same form of fallacy, it is a rhetorical argument meant to defend a much weaker fallacy by appeal to force in the belief that Scripture is inerrant, which is in turn the preliterate error that words, The Word, has absolute meaning and authority. The wiggle space you get when most people really talk about what Scripture means brings a smile to my lips, since I know that they are only trying to conceal their own, or someone else's subjective opinion, about what the words mean, they don't know what they mean, and they resort to appeal to force to claim that they do.
The Internet has helped to reveal these shams for what they are, informal logic errors, and the result is fair enough, the people who use and repeat them are exposed to public ridicule. This is but the illumination of intellectual backwaters, intellectual cesspools to light and heat so that soggy ideas evaporate.
Not to mention Matthew 22 where Dante got his definition of the lowest of the low, outward devout people whose deeds make then hypocrites. The problem is that everything you say references Biblical precedent. That is a very preliterate approach. When books became cheap, the Word became separate from its meaning, people discovered ambiguity in the meaning of words and because words were written down no longer meant that they were authority.
Since America is really a backwater intellectually and a refuge for backward people fleeing better ideas, the religion of 1600 designed for people barely able to read and reason still survives here. To the OP, the reason the Internet is weakening faith in these religions is that people who have been forcefully isolated intellectually in places like the Deep South and in many rural locations elsewhere are being exposed to ideas that remove their provincialism.
This problem runs deep in the American psyche and is not simply due to crack pot Protestants. It is due to the draw of these shores of anti-social people of all kinds. It is reflected in the political devides in the country today. The seduction of America is that until recently it has been a place where if you wanted to go it alone and live by yourself or with your select elite you could easily. Now, that is becoming much harder to do, The world has become much more interconnected than every before, and the Internet is but one part of that. It used to be that you didn't have to worry about the consequences of being selfish, now those consequences arrive at your doorstep much faster than they used to, and what you do has effects far away and in ways you never imagined.
The American ideal is beginning to fail us, because we are much more used to running away from each other than being forced to stay by and work out a compromising solution. People who can't compromise should become a disadvantage in time. This conundrum is really at the core of U.S. Politics and I think that it will eventually
divide up the Union. It is true that compromise is core to the nation being able to work, but the number of factions who cannot compromise is on the rise for a wide variety reasons, authoritarian religious views are but one of these.
There is some argument missing here. The usual story is that rats infected humans by spreading fleas that spread the microbe through bite.. I am not sure what the finding says about humans. Was mankind a vector of the flea? That might not be all that surprising as fleas and ticks often cam be spread by other mammals to humans. The novelty is that the flea could live on people without the rat host being necessary.
Maybe the use of Tobacco is just due to the fact that its genome has been well studied, so it is easy to splice in a gene that produces a desired molecule. The OP did not state that the plant makes the substance on its own, only that it is used as a factory for it. Still, it is possible that a plant that people abuse could also produce other useful substances that used in different ways could be cures for disease.
But isn't the 50:1 leverage you mention just code language for people in the financial world creating value out of thin air, and we aren't just talking about fiat currency here? I hear where you are coming from rather loud and clear, so if national banks can lie about value so can equities markets, bond markets. So even though under the laws of a nation financial guys with all the smart arguments and angles can evade blame, or even fix it on the governments who no longer base their currencies on specie, that is is the work that money does or doesn't do to generate production in tangible ways that gives value to people and that the speculation they create denies value to people, making investors unavailable to them.
Sad to say, and let it be a warning, that failure of a world economy to represent value, leads to violence. When markets don't work fairly, people behave badly. Like it or not, that is background to why Russia is behaving badly now, the Russian economy is failing and Putin is using nationalism as a distraction from his failings as a leader and possibly as an excuse to recreate an empire which can remedy his economic woes in the near term.
Even if we were to agree that neoliberalism is a failed political economy, that would still leave a debate as to the cause. I think that the cause is much more the financialization of assets on the global level and that was unleashed by the Internet and digital technology, by speeding up the abstraction of value. Again the lesson of Credit Default Swaps is not just the potential for fraud, which you are correct in pointing out is hard to prove in a court of law. but how subjective the assigning a value to assets really is. This is something most traders want to hide behind spreadsheets, but the weak link is some analyst sitting in his cubical and picking values out of thin air. That is no different from the board of a national bank doing the same thinf with the exchange rate of currancies. It is conceraling the subjectivity of evaluation behind a facade of objectivity and it is the downfall of every world economic system/ The downfall results in international dislocation and war.
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Americans seem to be somewhat blind about abuse of power by the wealthy, the abuse of power that money brings. People in Europe have a more sanguine attitude towards the relationship of wealth to power, which is one reason trade unions are still more powerful in Europe than in the U.S. Americans have a much less critical relationship towards "getting ahead" and economic growth and development than they should. The lopsided income distribution is beginning to take its toll on the belief Americans have in fairness, that others really respect their needs and are reasonably fair about it. Fairness in conduct is a big part of the stability of the American system and the current economic order and its political results are being seen as increasingly unfair. This is bound to result in trouble. I live in Silicon Valley in California and the effects are already being seen in an overcrowded real estate market that is driving renters out of their homes. The perception is rapidly emerging that our political representatives have so bought into the promotion of business that they do not understand its problems and that investors who drive the growth of jobs do not care if what benefits a few techies hurts the interests of a majority and of people who were born and raised here.
This is probably going to have more and more bad effects unless people here reassesss their assumptions about economics and growth, and this becomes a direct political challenge to both major parties and to the wealthy who have been able to placate some by "Giving Back" which is tokenism, a tiny percentage of the cost to the great majority in society. It looks like we may have been better off if Rick Perry had actually gotten his wish and some of those companies had moved to Austin and Huston Texas. More than likely, the people in Texas would have learned a lesson their politics blinds them and many other Americans to, that growth is not always a good thing, that it eeds to be controlled and planned and that the selfish motives of investors and plutocrats is not enough wisdom to preserve balance or fairness in society, and although they might get away with it for a time, but sooner than later it will have some unpleasent reprocussion.
On this note, Phil Mattier, who I think is a notorious Right Winger, Pro Business Republican advocate at KPIX CBS/Ch 5 in San Francisco ran a piece yesterday about how the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was behind the protests against Google and Twitter downtown, including the obstruction of the Google buses that take Google employees, who are driving prices up in San Francisco, to commute down to jobs in Mountaon View. He gave the story as if it were some great news flash of a conspiracy between unions and the protests. This would hardly phase people elsewhere in the world but it runs big here because Americans have this delusion that to resist the will of business people is unpatriotic, Communist, and subversive. I suppose that after Ronald Reagan busted the flight controllers union in 1982 that the promoters of a wide open labor pool controlled by employers is a universal good, it is not. The reaction against Silicon Valley business is likely to get worse before it imporves, and that will have been deserved.
Are you kidding? You pick your arguments carefully, and very selectively. Would you base your judgement that it is safe for you to go outside and walk the streets of your neighborhood based on the income distribution of your fellow citizens? Your safety might be directly related to how much real earning power a significant number of them gained or lost, rather than some abstraction about incentives. Given that people are not logical or rational, the perception that their lot has declined over all might figure in their temptation to commit crime, property crime especially. It is all about perceptions not accounting. That is why economics cannot be science. Everything adds up when people behave in predictable fashion, but numbers go haywire when models break down and then historical processes that tend to destroy wealth take over.
This is part of a bigger problem. Who really benefits from the tax code? It isn't you and I, who have a W-2 and maybe a couple of 1099 or K2 income reports. It is the business guys who got Congress to create all that complexity to allow them for many exemptions you and I can't find let alone use. So Intuit trying to protect its business model that relies on the complexity of the 1040 and itemized deductions is just a side-effect of the overall complexity and exemptions for special interests, businesses, mostly to have their burden reduced. And they get that because they can go to Congress, can buy members of Congress or pay to have access to them and ask for and get favors. So a complex tax code as well as complex filing favors the powerful and the wealthy, as does a flat tax, as well.
We still need a progressive income tax, because the rich get more of a break from a flat tax than do low to moderate wadge earners, but the process could be much simpler for most people. That is disfavors Intuit is too bud, but tough, the Congress should not be asked to support a private firm's business model for no other good reason. that is no different tan if you or I defrauded the government.
On, NO, they found a serious bug in a FOSS package, Oh NO, the proprietary fanboys are saying that the Sky is Falling! Meanwhile, a fix comes out on the day that the advisory is issued and the patch to the library is on several repositories that day. On April 7, the day of the CERT, Debian had a patch to the openssl livrary.
Oh, I don't know if there is a strong case for collusion, after all if A charges 30% extra than copy cat by B and C doesn't require much imagination or planning, especially if B and C think that consumers will pay the tax. The minute you start thinking that you can evade the tax and that you don't have to buy into a captive market, then you look at it differently.You don't use Google Doc or Google Drive because you can see that the products are all about locking you in, regardless if they are based on Open Source, and violate its intent. You don't use HTML and Word-like formats under closed subsets of open standards by Google, and you use other more powerful open standards like LaTex and thumb you nose at Google.
This removes one of the arguments for Windows, that even though new versions create problems, M$ would try to patch them fairly quickly and make the upgrade step fairly painless. Now, they aren't even trying to do that, and the ever present security holes are still there. So can M$ be long for this world. It may be that suddenly M$ is failing as a company and may capitulate to the dominance of open source alternatives, even though that exposes users to more complexity?
In spite of the piss war that goes on over updating commands, and the different approaches in Linux, the update complexity is no worse than it would be with any multiple sourced set of updates and it is possible to hide most of the complexity behind a simple GUI interface, just as it isn't necessary to expose users to command line complexity. How many Mac user's have ever opened Terminal? You and I who know the shell and know the command line want the complexity because it gives us fine control and especially when we encounter a problem we can hope to troubleshoot and fix it ourselves. It took until Windows Vista to bring its users anywhere near to that level of information to be able to troubleshoot their problems with any comparable transparency as grepping through a UNIX log file and issuing commands from the shell proactively as every UNIX sysadmin has been able to do for decades. So, the future is just different. It may be that if M$ survives, which it might not, that OSs end up looking more like Linux and that users will have to develop a different set of habits. How can that be any worse than using Android or OS X or other UNIX derived OS?
Of course most of the driver problems, i.e. Nvidia, have to do with the binary being closed source and with the vendor being coerced to provide a driver against their business plan to remain closed source while operating in an open sourced environment, I hear you Richard Stalman. Most of the Linux install problems have to do with closed hardware designed for Windows systems.
People get this wrong all the time because the old idea was that most of what you know comes from your training as an apprentice. That can no longer be true because technology is changing so fast. In fact it is more valuable to learn how to learn. That is something a particular form of higher education can help you do. It can train you with thinking and critical skills that guide you to new knowledge. In a way it is almost as if the kind of skills that were taught in Plato's Academy, updated of course, are more important now than ever before. People with no formal education are easy to spot in this standard. They have gaps in their knowledge that are hard to explain logically, and the remedy for that seems to have been a bout in a "sophomoric" debating society. That exercises the mental muscle and challenges the beast of prejudice in a way that an informal or vocationally directed training does not. This shows in the prevalence of crack-pot or pseudoscience ideas in engineers, especially. The electrical engineering people I have known over the years seem particularly prone to bizarre beliefs. The reason for this seems to be the specialization of education and the gaps in their training. People who train in more traditional sciences and especially those who get to experience research learn much more how to think generally, techniques like suspending judgement and a bull-shit detector are great teachers.
What this subject seems to be about really is that some people are "Tools", that is functionaries inside organizations whose self-appointed role is to enforce the status quo. You know the types, these are the guys who make sweeping generalization and give pat arguments based on business or finance as though they are in charge. They may be revealing their own uncreativeness or defending their holding against competition by telling everyone else what not to do, give "advice" which is really negative and self-serving. They may actually be enforcing elitist or insider practices that actively discourage competition.
To the point of the OP, this may be one of those efforts as misinformation made by someone with a hidden (financial) agenda, to get people cheaper than possible if they presented a college diploma. What is of little doubt is that what can be learned of a subject like "coding" is open ended and that a good formal training in subjects like algorithem design and performance is of obvious value, if not always a requirement of the task at hand, and that to be able to know of when formal topics are important is of great value. The issue boils down to what someone wants to pay you for, to be a compliant underling, like all the "Tools" that frequent these forums, or to pay you for that analytical skill that might be needed from time to rime.
It is a con game, you are describing. On the one hand employers, especially if they are run by financial people, always look to the bottom line and want to lure people in to work for as little as possible. They are concealing the fact that they want someone underqualified and underpaid that they can intimidate. If you work in such a place you are possibly a tool, if not evil. So, having to suggest suppressing your education is just a ruse to discourage people who might challenge authority by having sufficient critical skills to stand up to lies, and people who run most businesses are habitual liars anyway, and especially people in finance. These are repressive and uncreative people who are strangling the workforce and they will be purged, eventually. Maybe it will take a major war to reset priorities so that creative thinking is rewarded once again. The human condition arrives at virtue through its worse vices because what is lacking is more important to people than what you actually have. That is possibly a fatal flaw in our species.
You will undoubtedly assert the truth of your generalization, but they may as well be indicative of a sickness in your experience.
There is a way to look at this issue, by turning it on its head, especially given the political economics of the present. The core issue here may be that private business, relying on investment to operate, cannot create the jobs that might be needed. That is, what people want to do for a living. The point about going to university for academic reasons, i.e. intellectual interest in the subject, is fine, but even people who love a subject have to eventually support themselves and to do that their industry has to be supplied with investment and revenues that can support a decent wage. So, those who reverse the decision priorities and look at what disciplines pay more first may be wrong headed, but also if you made a decision about what interested you in 1970 or 1980 that it may not be well funded by now. That makes a case for following your heart instead of the market for jobs. It also says that a significant number of people do not have a strong sense of what to do with their lives. If you have a strong direction, the joy of doing the work will compensate for reduced compensation.
Maybe the weaknesses of market economics, especially as a world economic order, will retrain people especially in America, to be less interested in economic gain as a reward for their role in society and at the same time they will spend fewer hours working and be far less concerned with compensation and look to other rewards of having a role. The inefficiencies of the economics will cause this shift. Many desires are not funded by the economic system even though they are viable roles.
The Seven Deadly Sins
Most sysadmins are 6-wing 5
Type 5 on enneagram, the sin is greed.
Type 4 it is envy
Type 2 Pride
Types 7 Gluttony
Type 8 Lust
Type 9 Sloth
Type 1 Anger
Notice that the core types 3 and 6 do not map directly, Modern mapping add traits of Type 6 Cowardice and Type 3 Deceit and these can be seen as variants of the Sloth at point 9 since they are all sins of omission, not being available, not cmmitting to action and not supporting truth.
Yeah, I was writing FORTRAN back about 1970 and I heard the term back then. It is only for the abuse of GOTO to kludge code together.
I think that you are ignoring something. People in society must have a meaningful role of some sort to fulfill, and at least that role must justify their support, so the relentless march of technical change driven by engineers who have, in general, a very poor estimate of the largely unintended consequences, and by investors whose only incentive seems to be short-term gain, does not anticipate that idle hands DO make the devil's workshop, and not only in the sense that "work" is some manual or mental process, but that enough of it must exist and be funded so that opportunity is reasonable for most people. To create a situation where increasingly tiny elites benefit the most and where more and more others are marginalized is just asking for trouble. It is asking for major social and political upheaval, for violence and crime, for factionalism. What a very uneven income distribution does is to sow the seeds for elitism and fachism, for exploitative and exclusive right-wing elites, for srivivalist mentality and for class welfare. It signals the end of democratic politics and inclusive institutions. Much of what you take for granted as civil society becomes a luxery in a gated garden, a gated community.
Unplanned selfishness is not enough to prevent this detioriation, market economics does not assure inclusion or fairness, in fact it tends to lead to elitism especially if the general perception is that opportunity and resources are decreasing or being sequestered for the benefit of a minority or a self-appointed elite. This was why the off-the-record remark made by Mitt Romney in May of 2012 was so damaging to his run for President. He was revealed as an elitist.
History has a harsh treatment of uncaring elites and for societies that abandon most of their people. It purges the elites. There are times of external decline which favor elites, but any time where opportunity exists but is thwarted by entrenched interests results in those obstructions being swept aside. Whether it is business governence, finance, banking practices, entrenched institutions, special interests, or corrupt political and economic groups. they can be swept aside and quickly and often violently as well. There are some signs that a violent reaction to the status quo could be a result if compromises, wisdom, and solutions are not found for then challenges we face, even America is not immune for these reactions and may have been spared so far in its history by a sense of public duty and compromise in its leaders in government and business. That could change. We are now much more interdependent, the urge to go solo is now much more problematic, even Putin is going to learn that, Russia cannot be immune from the wrath of the rest of the world for acting in its own nationalist interest, nor can an American corporation acting it its own economic interest, be immune, as GM is discovering.
I was really saying that in America scientists are increasingly pressured by people they work for to self-censor their advice, to go light on warning alarms if they happen to work for an energy company or if they work for government agencies, i.e. NOAA, WRT climate change, and in the case of the geologic hazards to not be too alarmist in the face of politicians and cities who are trying to booster real estate values and business. Were geologists more effective against business interests in America then practices like allowing for older structures to not be up to earthquake codes, gradfathered against newer building codes that incorporate adjustments to seismic risk, would be less acceptable. In San Francisco Ca. there are about 1000 structures that could collapse in a M= 7.0 on the Hayward or San Andreas Faults which is a expected risk in the next 30 years or so.
The pressures are very high to suppress warnings about landslides in Washington state against the interests of real estate interests and city planning commissions, who often cater to developers, real estate agents, tax assessors, remembering that in America it is property taxes that support many local jurisidictions.
In the San Franciscio Bay Area the property values are over inflated as are the rents because demand far exceeds supply and there are no incentives to discourage investment in tech. I wonder how may of those people know that the over-priced property they own in San Francisco, increasingly owned by Asians, would be serverly damaged or destroyed in an expected quake.
The Loma Prieta quake of 1989 was not the worst case situation by a long shot. It was centered in about the most remote place it could have been on the active faults of the Bay Area, so even though it was an M = 7.1, a quake that size on the Hayward Fault in Berkeley would have a much bigger impact on people and property.
Funny thing about discrimination law is that it doesn't prevent discrimination, it merely trains people what not to say. The OP says that clearly. What would be illegal was implied but carefully never said explicitly, and it is hard to prove intent. I knew of a case many years ago where it looked like a line manager was choosing people to lay off who had used the company medical benefits, such costs come directly off the bottom line, but nothing was provable because no intent to do that was stated, meaning in public. The result is that the law is an aid to people who discriminate.
We are lucky that many people who lead like to be liked and almost worse than being fired outright is to be shamed. At least if the CEO has a disagreement with the board and the shareholders, he can rationalize that he did the best he could, but if he knows that according to his own standards he made a mistake or did wrong that he feels shame for it, then he may resign on his own accord. That is good. It levels the playing field between ordinary and powerful people.
Do any of you know the music in the OP? The key is G-major, and most of the music would be played on the higher pitched strings. It is not at all the same as, say, the middle movement of the Tschaikovsky Violin Concerto, the movement in B-Minor, so I wonder at the quality of the test, or what if they used Bach unaccompanied Sonatas and Partitas or Beethoven String Quartets?
One needs to judge the tone of each range, so music that exercises the G-string, especially the open G-string, the lowest note a violin can make, the G below Middle C, is as significant at what can be played on the top E-string.I would much rather here the Bach C-major Partita than the Beethoven Concerto.
Aside from the idea of an extranet, non-IP, more dynamically routed mesh network as an answer to non NN and snooping, there are other reasons to doubt that Facebook or Google will really take over the Internet. People make the mistake of thinking in terms of current technology and they assume wrongly that technology that might be new here in the U.S. in five years might not get adopted faster in new markets than here. So the assumption has to be that the plans of Facebook and Google to bring the Internet to most of the rest of humanity and to do it in the captive market way they are infamous for is based on the assumption that the tool of choice is going to be the cheap ubiquitous smart phone, or even a cell-phone with 10X40 character display. How can I doubt this? Just today I posted a comment on Facebook's developer page suggesting that changes be allowed to their textarea widget rules, that they allow for Markdown and not be so ruthless about compressing out white space. The same issue applies to all of Google. Both companies are built around the Javascript textarea Widget and both companies are committed to keeping the mode of communication in that impoverished and frustrating form. What would really hurt both companies is for desktop screen resolutions to be made available from cell-phone form factored devices that use projected keyboards, these already exist, and projected full sized virtual displays that could be rendered by a laser or projected onto a flat surface. The restrictions FB and Google impose on Social Media use of the testarea widget would no longer be relavent, except for the simple data mining application, and the opportunity would exist for a third party to steal away their market share by offering a full editing interface, return to the desktop way of using the Internet. One of the smartphone makers could easily make this innovation and we would be free of artificial restrictions.
But of course deregulation or no regulation contains a conundrum. The ISPs and others can selectively throttle connections, making net neutrality moot anyway. The issue here is that unregulated monopolies can abuse access of their customers with no regulation, and that groups of companies in a cartel can abuse access of their customers with regulation. This becomes a problem of defeating those who manipulate access, either by taking away their market or by attacking their relationship with regulators. People are people. The worst urges of people in business and those in government are somewhat the same, the main difference being that what government power mongers do is a bit easier to uncover than what goes on in most businesses. It may be easier to look for alternative networking technology that does not have static single points of control, like having the backbone of the Internet passing through NSA HQ, then to fix a system that has attracted the attention of power and greed.
Has this one got off on a wrong footing, or is it that conversations where most of the people who post have nothing knowledgable to say head off to some state of lowest energy, a Ground State, where all topics decay into political and religious memed canned arguments?
Were it not for Dark Matter the OP would seem more relevant five or ten years ago than it does now. Given that it is now thought that matter as we know it, matter that interactls via Maxwell's Laws, is not the main mass constituant in the Universe, that the relationship of Dark Matter to cosmology is a tad more important than the lack of symmetry between matter and antimatter. The OP could have come from a time wrap, although I know that there are still important issues about symmerty breaking events in the early history of our Universe.
So there is good confidence that Dark Matter exists, but we don't know yet what it is, galaxy clusters and galaxy dynamics behaves as though matter. that has gravity but otherwise does not interact with the visible matter, can model how what is visible is moving. Here computers are key tools in the argument. I should say that it might be more important for us to pay attention to what Dark Matter might be.
Free Will is a Rationalist Christian invention and a lie. I suspect that most authoritarian Christians really dislike psychology because it argues that most human behavior is unconscious and not rational. The idea behind Christian Free Will is that God has laid down his law and you have the choice to obey it or not. That is authoritarian and not related at all to what modern findings say about how people form ideas based on preconditioning, and most of it happening unconsciously before awareness. Aware ideas and arguments are really ad hoc statements for pre-judgements, prejudice, and so the idea of Christian moral choice has to do with cultural conditioning of acceptable norms and not any rational analysis of moral issues.
In fact the way your religion works is to precondition decision making with norms that are established purely by appeal to force arguments saying that you will go to Hell if you don't accept their authority. This was disposed of by Spinoza in the 17th Century and it shows how backward American Protestants truly are.
Creationism, as an argument, is truely based on the same form of fallacy, it is a rhetorical argument meant to defend a much weaker fallacy by appeal to force in the belief that Scripture is inerrant, which is in turn the preliterate error that words, The Word, has absolute meaning and authority. The wiggle space you get when most people really talk about what Scripture means brings a smile to my lips, since I know that they are only trying to conceal their own, or someone else's subjective opinion, about what the words mean, they don't know what they mean, and they resort to appeal to force to claim that they do.
The Internet has helped to reveal these shams for what they are, informal logic errors, and the result is fair enough, the people who use and repeat them are exposed to public ridicule. This is but the illumination of intellectual backwaters, intellectual cesspools to light and heat so that soggy ideas evaporate.
Not to mention Matthew 22 where Dante got his definition of the lowest of the low, outward devout people whose deeds make then hypocrites. The problem is that everything you say references Biblical precedent. That is a very preliterate approach. When books became cheap, the Word became separate from its meaning, people discovered ambiguity in the meaning of words and because words were written down no longer meant that they were authority.
Since America is really a backwater intellectually and a refuge for backward people fleeing better ideas, the religion of 1600 designed for people barely able to read and reason still survives here. To the OP, the reason the Internet is weakening faith in these religions is that people who have been forcefully isolated intellectually in places like the Deep South and in many rural locations elsewhere are being exposed to ideas that remove their provincialism.
This problem runs deep in the American psyche and is not simply due to crack pot Protestants. It is due to the draw of these shores of anti-social people of all kinds. It is reflected in the political devides in the country today. The seduction of America is that until recently it has been a place where if you wanted to go it alone and live by yourself or with your select elite you could easily. Now, that is becoming much harder to do, The world has become much more interconnected than every before, and the Internet is but one part of that. It used to be that you didn't have to worry about the consequences of being selfish, now those consequences arrive at your doorstep much faster than they used to, and what you do has effects far away and in ways you never imagined.
The American ideal is beginning to fail us, because we are much more used to running away from each other than being forced to stay by and work out a compromising solution. People who can't compromise should become a disadvantage in time. This conundrum is really at the core of U.S. Politics and I think that it will eventually divide up the Union. It is true that compromise is core to the nation being able to work, but the number of factions who cannot compromise is on the rise for a wide variety reasons, authoritarian religious views are but one of these.
There is some argument missing here. The usual story is that rats infected humans by spreading fleas that spread the microbe through bite.. I am not sure what the finding says about humans. Was mankind a vector of the flea? That might not be all that surprising as fleas and ticks often cam be spread by other mammals to humans. The novelty is that the flea could live on people without the rat host being necessary.
Maybe the use of Tobacco is just due to the fact that its genome has been well studied, so it is easy to splice in a gene that produces a desired molecule. The OP did not state that the plant makes the substance on its own, only that it is used as a factory for it. Still, it is possible that a plant that people abuse could also produce other useful substances that used in different ways could be cures for disease.
But isn't the 50:1 leverage you mention just code language for people in the financial world creating value out of thin air, and we aren't just talking about fiat currency here? I hear where you are coming from rather loud and clear, so if national banks can lie about value so can equities markets, bond markets. So even though under the laws of a nation financial guys with all the smart arguments and angles can evade blame, or even fix it on the governments who no longer base their currencies on specie, that is is the work that money does or doesn't do to generate production in tangible ways that gives value to people and that the speculation they create denies value to people, making investors unavailable to them.
Sad to say, and let it be a warning, that failure of a world economy to represent value, leads to violence. When markets don't work fairly, people behave badly. Like it or not, that is background to why Russia is behaving badly now, the Russian economy is failing and Putin is using nationalism as a distraction from his failings as a leader and possibly as an excuse to recreate an empire which can remedy his economic woes in the near term.
Even if we were to agree that neoliberalism is a failed political economy, that would still leave a debate as to the cause. I think that the cause is much more the financialization of assets on the global level and that was unleashed by the Internet and digital technology, by speeding up the abstraction of value. Again the lesson of Credit Default Swaps is not just the potential for fraud, which you are correct in pointing out is hard to prove in a court of law. but how subjective the assigning a value to assets really is. This is something most traders want to hide behind spreadsheets, but the weak link is some analyst sitting in his cubical and picking values out of thin air. That is no different from the board of a national bank doing the same thinf with the exchange rate of currancies. It is conceraling the subjectivity of evaluation behind a facade of objectivity and it is the downfall of every world economic system/ The downfall results in international dislocation and war.
Wait, I thought the Darth Vader was already the guy in charge in Russia.