when I said "fire them all" I was agreeing with the GP's point of firing the contractors on the ACA website
Of course, they screwed up, but if you believe that there are better contractors to be hired, then the question is: why didn't the administration hire them in the first place? Either the administration couldn't figure out who to hire, or they deliberately hired bad contractors. Either way, the people who should get fired are the current administration: they are either incompetent or corrupt.
... that's all... well, that and all GOP'ers;)
We tried that. I myself voted for Obama because he promised to undo the damage done by the Bush administration. It has turned out to be an utter disaster.
humans are **infinitely** complex & it scares you....you are wrong to always assume the absolute most machiavellian, short-sighted, perspective when you examine other's behavior
Quite the opposite: I'm saying that if we want government to be efficient, government decision makers need to be more short-sighted and ruthless than they are.
And it doesn't "scare me", I'm just explaining to you where your error lies. People like you keep advocating that the solution to humanity's problems is getting better people into government ("fire them all with prejudice"). It won't work because your premise is wrong.
Not everyone boils all their decisions down to what will give them the most Machiavellian style power over their surroundings.....because it is a *zero sum game*
We completely agree on that: government employees are motivated by lots of different things, many of them what they consider lofty, altruistic, and noble goals. But that is the problem: if we want an efficient government, then government employees need to be ruthlessly implementing efficiency ahead of all other considerations.
That's what you're missing....in a Democracy we ***can vote the bastards out***
What you're missing is that this is not a problem with individuals. Government employees and politicians behave, by and large, rationally and morally within their own understanding and the desires of their constituents. Voting isn't going to change the way they behave because they already behave the way voters want them to. People like you just can't get it through their thick heads that you can't have politicians handing out the pork they want and simultaneously not pay for it somehow.
If humans in a government system can't adapt and fix it, then **NO SYSTEM** will be any better....because all systems rely on humans.
Actually, if you take the same humans who make bad decisions as government employees and give them their own businesses to run, they will start making good decisions. That is because as business people, they become ruthless, power-hungry profit maximizers. And, unlike government employees, any businessman foolishly trying to put lofty ideals ahead of efficiency will simply go out of business. What matters is, in fact, the system, not the individuals.
In fact, I went to a liberal arts school and took plenty of art, music, literature, and foreign languages. But at the same time I learned what I needed to earn a living. In your case, your liberal arts education merely seems to have turned you into an ignorant jerk.
I'm not sure what "fact" you think those three stories are supposed to provide. You have three students who failed out of college and obviously made bad financial decisions, since they ended up owing more than average and not even getting a degree out of it. Statistically, more
Education is not an equalizer. It doesn't promote social mobility. The gaps between high- and low-income kids are widening. The role of class is growing. Growing incomes at the top, single-parent households, segregated neighborhoods, lower-quality neighborhood schools, and increasing college costs are responsible. So only the prosperous get educated.
College attendance has been steadily increasing across the population, race, and class since 1965. And college graduation rates are not that dissimilar: about 60-70% for kids from families making $70k+, and about 45-55% for kids from families making less than $25k. The remaining difference is more than adequately explained by factors other than educational or financial inequality.
Plenty of people with little or no money manage to go to college, on scholarship, loans, and by working. I got an excellent education without taking out loans and without my parents spending a dime on it. My parents had literally nothing and worked themselves through college. Is it harder if you have little or no money? Yes. But so what?
So, first solar companies lobby politicians to support solar power and impose regulations on electric companies. Then, electric companies are lobbying politicians to compensate them for lost business. It's crooks on all sides.
ok you got me...i'm curious...what do you mean by 'incentive'?
The kind of rewards people receive for the work they do: increasing personal wealth, continued employment, peer recognition, higher salary, better office, new job opportunities, etc.
also, if you feel like it, can you explain how government contracts will **always** be doled out as political favors? Do you mean 'practically' always or are you saying its inherent?
"Always" not in the sense that every single one of them is, but in the sense that it is a very common part of government contracting that you cannot eliminate through reforms, regulations, or better government.
can you give a counter-example? something where a person **would** have the proper incentive as you define it to do *excelent* work on a project like this? how would that look?
If you run your own business, you have a strong financial incentive to make it easy for people to sign up with you and do business with you. Furthermore, if you fail to do so, you go out of business. Neither incentive nor mechanism exists for the government. Government services like this are mandatory, and government can't go out of businesses by people choosing to go elsewhere.
The key is that far less money now leaves Germany to go to various oil producing countries.
German renewable energy comes mainly from wind and "biomass", not solar. Solar is about 5%, but Germany is effectively dependent on Chinese imports to maintain even that. And Germany has a frightening dependence on foreign energy sources, making it very vulnerable. In contrast, the US has become largely energy independent due to fracking.
This is why the US economy, despite its many structural problems, will thrive over the next decade due to the huge increase in domestic oil production combined with greater fuel economy. That is the US will send far less money to the middle east, Venezuela, Nigeria, etc, while keeping it domestically.
That has nothing to do with "keeping money circulating in your own economy". If you find a $1m gold nugget in your backyard, you're $1m richer for the simple reason that you now own a $1m gold nugget. That's why high domestic oil production makes us richer. Where and how money circulates has nothing to do with it.
So if you don't save money on the surface when you dig deep you will find that keeping the money circulating in your own economy is far better for your economy.
Unless the money "circulates" in your economy for a good reason, it won't help you. Government policies attempted to "keep money" somewhere may or may not improve some numerical indicators, but they always make people worse off.
Debating 'gov't VS private sector' can be interesting or it can be excruciating. In this case we can surely fault the government for being dumb enough to pay these companies
It's not stupidity. Government employees have no incentive to spend public funds wisely. Many of them may make an effort because they try to be decent people, but that's not enough.
If government contracts weren't doled out as political favors the data wouldn't be so noisy.
Government contracts will always be doled out as political favors.
Most instate Universities with room and board are around $18,000/yr. So, a 4 year degree is in the neighborhood of $72,000. I don't know what mid-size cars you drive, but that's pretty steep. College has become anything but more affordable. If it had been, there would have been less need for student loans, not more.
Average college debt is about $36k. That's because parents support their kids, people work to support themselves, and low income students get financial aid. I got financial aid and worked in college.
It is becoming more and more rare for someone who works behind a desk to not benefit greatly from a college education. And that is not just to get a job; it really does help educate the workplace. Most people do not have the self-motivation to educate themselves so an extra 4 years of "forced" education is useful.
Giving people four years of free room and board while getting an art history degree is not "forced education", it is allowing them to waste another four years of their lives.
Even if I grant you that statement, if typical 18 year-olds were decently equipped to make such rest-of-your-life decisions they wouldn't be such attractive targets for military recruiters.
If they pick the wrong career, paying back a student loan is the least of their worries. And the typical teenager has parents to help them make decisions.
40 years ago the U.S. had a system of free college education (like most of Europe has today). It worked.
Forty years ago, only about 10% of Americans graduated with a college degree; today it's more than three times that. And your idea that European nations just give everybody a free college education is a fairy tale.
If you charge people for college, only the rich can go to college. For the rest of us, the other choice is to go into debt that you may never repay.
College has generally become more affordable, and far more people go to college now than 40 years ago. Furthermore, a college education costs about as much as a good mid-size car; if you can't afford paying that back, you picked the wrong major.
The job of government is to pay for education.
No, that's not its job, but for practical purposes, it's doing it already.
How ironic that you'd describe a government research project that way on the Internet.
There is nothing ironic about it. I think government funding for basic research is a good thing.
Trying to set specific numerical targets for battery performance is what's stupid. It's stupid when private companies do it, and it's stupid when government does it. The difference is that if private companies engage in this kind of stupidity, they go out of business. Politicians like Obama just blame the opposing party for their failures and then raise taxes to cover up for their own incompetence.
So it seems like the problem isn't with the way modern smartphones are designed in general, but with systems that put the baseband and the general purpose CPUs on the same chip.
[A government] uses collective resources to acquire information on matters individuals are not or badly capable of acquiring the same sort of information on (like testing all the food they buy for harmful substances). It then makes democratically supported decisions most individuals would or could not make (like black- or white-listing certain food additives).
That may be what you want governments to do, but many people reject that as the function of government.
Think about this one: do you think it should be illegal to sell your kidney?
No, it shouldn't be illegal to sell your own kidney.
I repeat: why outlaw the addition of rat poison to baby milk in [state X], but not in [state Y]?
We already established that your analogy doesn't work because it's about labeling, not absolute bans. There is another way in which your analogy doesn't work: rat poison is, in fact, widely distributed for human consumption and even consumption by babies, because in some circumstances, its medical benefits outweigh its risks. And it's the same for wood burning stoves: in some (actually, many) situations, their benefits outweigh their risks. Unlike rat poison, where risk/benefit depends on medical context, for wood burning stoves, risk/benefit depends on geographic context. That's why some places might decide to outlaw them, why others might decide to keep them.
If you continue to fail to address my main points
You don't have points. Your analogies are broken in multiple ways, and you stupidly insist that your values and preferences are universal, and that it is the job of government to impose those values on society as a whole. With your view, we can go back to making any kind of private conduct illegal: homosexuality, oral sex, adultery, cutting the nose off the cheese. Yours is a ridiculous and outdated world view that more and more people are, fortunately, discarding.
And that's not even getting at the fact that you're evidently scientifically illiterate and that your value system isn't even internally consistent. In the end, you and people like you want to impose arbitrary, useless policies on others for no rational reason whatsoever.
Why? Because if you succeed, you could own the market for batteries for the next couple of decades, and every car maker would have to buy from you. The fact that companies aren't investing more in it tells you that they believe they aren't going to succeed.
Tesla can afford to stick today's tech into their cars because there is nothing better, and though it really isn't efficient enough by itself, direct and indirect subsidies make it it feasible.
Private companies aren't doing this research because they believe that (1) they are very unlikely to succeed, and (2) even if they did, there would be no market. Given how much money they would stand to make, they are probably right.
The Germans are spending tens of Billions getting batteries into homes to smooth out solar power. Their idea is simple; by encouraging people to actually buy the stuff it will create a market and get the companies moving on research and development. I am willing to bet that 90% of the American money will go to a select group of companies and universities that lobbied hard for that money.
Germany tried the same thing with photovoltaic. The result? No demonstrable increase in the rate of innovation, a temporary price increase of solar panels due to artificially high demand, very high electricity prices, and after German tax and rate payers poured all that money into the industry, the manufacturers went to China anyway. Why would it work any better with batteries?
To the degree that government should fund such research, it should fund it through government research labs, not some weird scheme that ends up being nothing more than government handouts to private companies.
<sarcasm>Our glorious Man of Steel has handed down the new 5 year plan of the New Economic Policy and Progress for our nation. His commands shall be carried out without fail! Workers of the world rejoice!</sarcasm>
So which nation is it which has made most noise about US being the leader of the free world?
The US is the leader of the free world because the rest of the free world has been pretty weak since WWII. And the US is the "land of the free" relative to most of the rest of the world. Those are observations, not mission statements.
Europeans get it wrong in two ways: (1) they erroneously believe that it is America's job to promote Western ideals, and (2) they fault America for putting its own interests ahead of those ideals. In reality, the only job US politicians have is to ensure US prosperity and security. It is a lucky coincidence that that usually involves promoting Western ideals, nothing more. The sooner Europeans realize that, the better for all concerned.
If European taxpayers want to spread Western ideals, they should pay for it themselves; US taxpayers won't do it for them.
But if you're just concerned with any security problem with the baseband, consider that they're connected to the microphone. You don't need to get all the way in to the user CPU to turn the phone into a bug.
Why are you restating the obvious? That's been long known. That can't fiddle with my bank statements or grab my text chats, though. The question is whether the new vulnerability the article talks about is real or not.
JTAG is not generally under CPU control but I have seen setups where the BMC controls JTAG.... Actually, GPU access to main memory is controlled by... Consider too that something on the user side of that USB-serial connection...
None of that amounts to what the article claims. Is there any plausible mechanism by which the baseband CPU could conceivably access and alter all of smartphone memory across a wide range of devices as the article claims? I don't know of any. Standard DMA, graphics memory, JTAG, and USB do not have the capability.
I'm sure there are lots of security problems in lots of smartphones, involving baseband, and any of these other features. But I don't know of anything that amounts to a generic vulnerability due to a ubiquitous "master/slave" relationship between the baseband and the smartphone CPU as claimed in the article.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, they screwed up, but if you believe that there are better contractors to be hired, then the question is: why didn't the administration hire them in the first place? Either the administration couldn't figure out who to hire, or they deliberately hired bad contractors. Either way, the people who should get fired are the current administration: they are either incompetent or corrupt.
We tried that. I myself voted for Obama because he promised to undo the damage done by the Bush administration. It has turned out to be an utter disaster.
Quite the opposite: I'm saying that if we want government to be efficient, government decision makers need to be more short-sighted and ruthless than they are.
And it doesn't "scare me", I'm just explaining to you where your error lies. People like you keep advocating that the solution to humanity's problems is getting better people into government ("fire them all with prejudice"). It won't work because your premise is wrong.
We completely agree on that: government employees are motivated by lots of different things, many of them what they consider lofty, altruistic, and noble goals. But that is the problem: if we want an efficient government, then government employees need to be ruthlessly implementing efficiency ahead of all other considerations.
What you're missing is that this is not a problem with individuals. Government employees and politicians behave, by and large, rationally and morally within their own understanding and the desires of their constituents. Voting isn't going to change the way they behave because they already behave the way voters want them to. People like you just can't get it through their thick heads that you can't have politicians handing out the pork they want and simultaneously not pay for it somehow.
Actually, if you take the same humans who make bad decisions as government employees and give them their own businesses to run, they will start making good decisions. That is because as business people, they become ruthless, power-hungry profit maximizers. And, unlike government employees, any businessman foolishly trying to put lofty ideals ahead of efficiency will simply go out of business. What matters is, in fact, the system, not the individuals.
In fact, I went to a liberal arts school and took plenty of art, music, literature, and foreign languages. But at the same time I learned what I needed to earn a living. In your case, your liberal arts education merely seems to have turned you into an ignorant jerk.
I'm not sure what "fact" you think those three stories are supposed to provide. You have three students who failed out of college and obviously made bad financial decisions, since they ended up owing more than average and not even getting a degree out of it. Statistically, more
College attendance has been steadily increasing across the population, race, and class since 1965. And college graduation rates are not that dissimilar: about 60-70% for kids from families making $70k+, and about 45-55% for kids from families making less than $25k. The remaining difference is more than adequately explained by factors other than educational or financial inequality.
Plenty of people with little or no money manage to go to college, on scholarship, loans, and by working. I got an excellent education without taking out loans and without my parents spending a dime on it. My parents had literally nothing and worked themselves through college. Is it harder if you have little or no money? Yes. But so what?
So, first solar companies lobby politicians to support solar power and impose regulations on electric companies. Then, electric companies are lobbying politicians to compensate them for lost business. It's crooks on all sides.
As I was saying...
The kind of rewards people receive for the work they do: increasing personal wealth, continued employment, peer recognition, higher salary, better office, new job opportunities, etc.
"Always" not in the sense that every single one of them is, but in the sense that it is a very common part of government contracting that you cannot eliminate through reforms, regulations, or better government.
If you run your own business, you have a strong financial incentive to make it easy for people to sign up with you and do business with you. Furthermore, if you fail to do so, you go out of business. Neither incentive nor mechanism exists for the government. Government services like this are mandatory, and government can't go out of businesses by people choosing to go elsewhere.
German renewable energy comes mainly from wind and "biomass", not solar. Solar is about 5%, but Germany is effectively dependent on Chinese imports to maintain even that. And Germany has a frightening dependence on foreign energy sources, making it very vulnerable. In contrast, the US has become largely energy independent due to fracking.
That has nothing to do with "keeping money circulating in your own economy". If you find a $1m gold nugget in your backyard, you're $1m richer for the simple reason that you now own a $1m gold nugget. That's why high domestic oil production makes us richer. Where and how money circulates has nothing to do with it.
Unless the money "circulates" in your economy for a good reason, it won't help you. Government policies attempted to "keep money" somewhere may or may not improve some numerical indicators, but they always make people worse off.
It's not stupidity. Government employees have no incentive to spend public funds wisely. Many of them may make an effort because they try to be decent people, but that's not enough.
Government contracts will always be doled out as political favors.
It would be. Unfortunately, he is obviously incapable of pulling something like that off and would make things worse instead.
Average college debt is about $36k. That's because parents support their kids, people work to support themselves, and low income students get financial aid. I got financial aid and worked in college.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/17/pf/college/student-debt/
Giving people four years of free room and board while getting an art history degree is not "forced education", it is allowing them to waste another four years of their lives.
If they pick the wrong career, paying back a student loan is the least of their worries. And the typical teenager has parents to help them make decisions.
Forty years ago, only about 10% of Americans graduated with a college degree; today it's more than three times that. And your idea that European nations just give everybody a free college education is a fairy tale.
College has generally become more affordable, and far more people go to college now than 40 years ago. Furthermore, a college education costs about as much as a good mid-size car; if you can't afford paying that back, you picked the wrong major.
No, that's not its job, but for practical purposes, it's doing it already.
Obama is going to revolutionize and rationalize education, just like he has revolutionized and rationalized health care.
There is nothing ironic about it. I think government funding for basic research is a good thing.
Trying to set specific numerical targets for battery performance is what's stupid. It's stupid when private companies do it, and it's stupid when government does it. The difference is that if private companies engage in this kind of stupidity, they go out of business. Politicians like Obama just blame the opposing party for their failures and then raise taxes to cover up for their own incompetence.
So it seems like the problem isn't with the way modern smartphones are designed in general, but with systems that put the baseband and the general purpose CPUs on the same chip.
That may be what you want governments to do, but many people reject that as the function of government.
No, it shouldn't be illegal to sell your own kidney.
We already established that your analogy doesn't work because it's about labeling, not absolute bans. There is another way in which your analogy doesn't work: rat poison is, in fact, widely distributed for human consumption and even consumption by babies, because in some circumstances, its medical benefits outweigh its risks. And it's the same for wood burning stoves: in some (actually, many) situations, their benefits outweigh their risks. Unlike rat poison, where risk/benefit depends on medical context, for wood burning stoves, risk/benefit depends on geographic context. That's why some places might decide to outlaw them, why others might decide to keep them.
You don't have points. Your analogies are broken in multiple ways, and you stupidly insist that your values and preferences are universal, and that it is the job of government to impose those values on society as a whole. With your view, we can go back to making any kind of private conduct illegal: homosexuality, oral sex, adultery, cutting the nose off the cheese. Yours is a ridiculous and outdated world view that more and more people are, fortunately, discarding.
And that's not even getting at the fact that you're evidently scientifically illiterate and that your value system isn't even internally consistent. In the end, you and people like you want to impose arbitrary, useless policies on others for no rational reason whatsoever.
Why? Because if you succeed, you could own the market for batteries for the next couple of decades, and every car maker would have to buy from you. The fact that companies aren't investing more in it tells you that they believe they aren't going to succeed.
Tesla can afford to stick today's tech into their cars because there is nothing better, and though it really isn't efficient enough by itself, direct and indirect subsidies make it it feasible.
Private companies aren't doing this research because they believe that (1) they are very unlikely to succeed, and (2) even if they did, there would be no market. Given how much money they would stand to make, they are probably right.
Germany tried the same thing with photovoltaic. The result? No demonstrable increase in the rate of innovation, a temporary price increase of solar panels due to artificially high demand, very high electricity prices, and after German tax and rate payers poured all that money into the industry, the manufacturers went to China anyway. Why would it work any better with batteries?
To the degree that government should fund such research, it should fund it through government research labs, not some weird scheme that ends up being nothing more than government handouts to private companies.
<sarcasm>Our glorious Man of Steel has handed down the new 5 year plan of the New Economic Policy and Progress for our nation. His commands shall be carried out without fail! Workers of the world rejoice!</sarcasm>
The US is the leader of the free world because the rest of the free world has been pretty weak since WWII. And the US is the "land of the free" relative to most of the rest of the world. Those are observations, not mission statements.
Europeans get it wrong in two ways: (1) they erroneously believe that it is America's job to promote Western ideals, and (2) they fault America for putting its own interests ahead of those ideals. In reality, the only job US politicians have is to ensure US prosperity and security. It is a lucky coincidence that that usually involves promoting Western ideals, nothing more. The sooner Europeans realize that, the better for all concerned.
If European taxpayers want to spread Western ideals, they should pay for it themselves; US taxpayers won't do it for them.
That's been publicly known for more than a decade, and it's been widely used by police and spy agencies.
Why are you restating the obvious? That's been long known. That can't fiddle with my bank statements or grab my text chats, though. The question is whether the new vulnerability the article talks about is real or not.
None of that amounts to what the article claims. Is there any plausible mechanism by which the baseband CPU could conceivably access and alter all of smartphone memory across a wide range of devices as the article claims? I don't know of any. Standard DMA, graphics memory, JTAG, and USB do not have the capability.
I'm sure there are lots of security problems in lots of smartphones, involving baseband, and any of these other features. But I don't know of anything that amounts to a generic vulnerability due to a ubiquitous "master/slave" relationship between the baseband and the smartphone CPU as claimed in the article.