It looks as if the increase in spending on youth projects that I recall (but again can't find details of) in the 1980 s and early 90s happened at a time of falling taxation. So I think your argument is directly contrary to the facts, but I'd love to get my hands on the actual numbers.
BTW, I'm talking about over a much longer period --- I mean, you said yourself, "We've had socialised health care since 1948", so the state has been diverting increasing amounts of income from local initiatives for at least 60 years. 'Later on', as you said, youth programs were added --- i.e. diverting still more income.
As for being "contrary to the facts", well, there are so many variables at play it's difficult to impartially draw conclusions.
I never liked classical music for the first 32 years of my life. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, started liking it. (I'm also not rich.)
It's always been 'around me' in one way or another, and it never rubbed off before at all --- my dad loved it and it was always playing in the house since I can remember, several of my girlfriends happened to like classic music, even flatmates I've roomed with happened to like classical music. Had no effect on me. Then one day I just found myself bored with all the worn-out music I listened to up until my 20s, and all the new music coming out mostly just sounds like rehashed derivative trashy nihilist crap to me... so I thought I'd try out some classical, and voila, suddenly it clicked with me.
Re "Score:0, Offtopic", it annoys the crap out of me when mods mod admissions/corrections like this negatively --- it's just the poster clarifying the identity of who posted the comment, how can that possibly be "off topic", it's just neutral.
I'd be interested to hear your theories as to how the worldwide recession and decline in religion are caused by UK socialised healthcare.
Isn't it just what you said in your own post... money that used to be in private hands organised youth clubs and activities via the private / charity / church etc. sectors; nowadays that money gets taxed instead and spent by government on bigger/broader programs (which are also less religion-focused than e.g. a local church). As the state has gotten bigger, it's programs have supplanted more effective grass-roots ones that used to solve the problem at local level in communities, but now money is diverted from those to the state. The bigger the state gets, the less money every other non-state individual or organisation has, it's very simple.
You might have the right to do this; but consider the consequences; i.e. is it worth potentially losing your job or getting shunted aside?
Depends how good you think you are. If you're any good, you'll find another job, possibly one where you have a voice. If you're just average, and you think it will be hard to find another job, then toe the line.
I would silence my own purely technical opinion. If management disagrees, that's their prerogative, but it's also your prerogative to give impartial technical opinions. If I was the submitter, I would write up a report detailing his "recommendations", outlining why he thinks they would save money, and include a plan for implementation so that it all sounds workable. Submit the report to management and/or the board as e.g. "technical opinion and recommendation on IT solutions for the organisation" or whatever.
It's always better to get your case/viewpoint in writing, even if it goes nowhere. That way, if crap hits the fan (e.g. say it turns out some corruption was involved, for example) it will be clear you were never part of it.
If you are a 'true' technical person, you will always stand by your technical *opinions*. Now *actions* are another thing; as an employee on someone's payroll, you have to follow their orders, end of story, even if you disagree with them. But you don't have to do it quietly. Nor do you have to be happy with it; ultimately, if you think your management are fools, you are better off dusting off your resume and starting to look around for an employer that fits your own views better.
The alternative, if you're so inclined, is to learn to play the political game, climb the ladder, and once you're at the top, change the "strategy". Not for me thanks. Or what I ultimately did, start my own business.
From my experience these types of managers are often also technically clueless; by aligning with MS and allowing MS to 'guide' them, they have a solution that 'even they' can get implemented and thus they can retain their management position and prevent their incompetency from being exposed. The "strategy" they are referring to is the "strategy" of keeping their own jobs. If they had to implement something that might perhaps be more cost-efficient e.g. open source, it would require more knowledge than they have and they'd simply be lost.
I had made the comment half-jokingly, but I looked it up and it turns out you *really are* more likely to be killed by a lawnmower than by a poisonous snake in the US:
"There were 133 fatalities in 2006 from using lawnmowers of all types, based on a national probability sample of hospitals in the U.S. and its territories. In 2005, there were 406 deaths."
The argument about "safety" from "snakes" is PURE bullshit, given the odds of being killed by a snake are virtually nill, and given that the main safety risk is *in your own garden* where you can decide if you want to cut the grass anyway. This just proves that you can get the public to blindly accept anything, no matter how absurd, by telling them it's "for their safety" and mentioning some virtually imaginary and statistically negligible risk to scare them. Some humans may have a built-in fear of snakes, but one person's irrational hysteria doesn't grant them the right to control other people by restricting their basic liberties.
Why no hysterical outcry against lawnmowing? It's not only far more dangerous than snakes, but lawns have numerous other disadvantages: Noise, energy usage, pollution, cost, water usage (lawns are thirsty things), etc.
No, news isn't "just there", the person who writes up the initial report has to have food and a roof over their head, and it takes time, totally unlike oxygen. And it often takes travel, too, and management overheads. You are confusing production scarcity with distribution scarcity. News is actually very difficult to report initially, and remains so, but because of the Internet era, the *distribution* of that news has become incredibly cheap and fast and difficult to monopolise (but still not anything like oxygen, because the Internet is actually a big complex network that wasn't created by the Tooth Fairy, it cost a lot of money and still costs a lot of money to keep working). Anyway, because distribution used to be difficult, the old-style media used to fund news *production* (i.e. journalism) from the revenue from news *distribution* (e.g. printing a newspaper). The latter is now very cheap thanks to the Internet, but the former is still expensive and difficult. But to think it's anything like oxygen is sheer moronity. IT COSTS MONEY TO PRODUCE.
There are less than 10 deaths a year in the US from snake bites; frankly that seems a little hysterical to me. You're probably more likely to die in some kind of freak lawnmower accident.
If someone has a tacky garden, the neighbours are welcome to follow various recourses to coerce that person to improve their garden... write him little letters, ask him nicely, complain about it, help him pay for garden services, whatever... I draw the line though at abusing government structures to create laws to force others to plant in their garden what you want to see there. It is morally wrong, no matter how much it "affects your property values".
the US is in many way under-regulated (eg. the banking system,
Guess again. Our banking system is one of our most heavily-regulated industries, right up there with medicine and operating nuclear power plants.
-jcr
Yup; this propaganda has been spread recently by some who seek to broaden their powers that the cause of all this problem was an "unregulated" industry, which is simply false. Unfortunately propaganda still works well in this day and age, since most people just repeat whatever they hear.
All those evil bankers were motivated by a quick payoff that was enabled by not owning the loans anymore.
Yup, that's it in short. They effective perpetrated a kind of fraud by taking on high-risk debt, deliberately hiding and obfuscating that the debt was high risk, and reselling the debt. This doesn't happen by accident, and probably in some cases was already illegal in some way or another, although nobody's been prosecuted.
Your words imply that one needs merely to add regulation. I'm just pointing out that one can add regulation generously and not improve (perhaps even make the problem worse!) the situation.
Yup. Unfortunately most people hear the words "unregulated" or "under-regulated" and get scared, since those words are deliberately used to make it sound like someone else is able to do whatever bad thing they want. That's the whole point of using these 'scary-sounding' labels, to write government a blank cheque to pass whatever "regulation" happens to grant themselves more power and a bigger slice of that tax pie (which is starting to strain).
To me there seems a dangerous lack of discretion on the part of administrators, as to when laws ought, and more importantly, ought not to be applied.
Here's the thing, times are tough, so administrators are under pressure to 'justify their salaries'. If you're an administrator in charge of petty things like this, and you basically have little better to do, you will ultimately lose your job if you can't find a way to 'look busy'. So if you don't have anything truly useful to do, you can either lose your job and save taxpayers some money, or you can start "making work" by behaving like the "lawn police" and pursuing frivolous cases. Ultimately that's what it's about.
The most amazing thing about all this is that these peoples' salaries are being funded by a deficit while unemployment is also high: I mean, if society had excess cash to waste on pursuing cases like this, it would be one thing, but when you don't have the excess cash, these are precisely the kinds of state administrator jobs that should be cut first.
Excessive regulations are indeed a core part of the problem, since they themselves are often passed by other administrators trying to "justify their salaries", and then they need still more money to enforce. They also give administators a "blunt tool" to go after just about anyone they feel like, since almost everyone breaks some stupid law or 'code' every single day.
Except cars need more than "basic" physics to model and understand. A car is not a point mass. It's a collection of separated components that interact, with each subject to its own forces and constraints. There are also rotational acceleration components. Outputs are also not static, they are dependent on other inputs and there feedbacks between the various inputs and outputs of the different components, which themselves can even change based on the states of other components. The force/acceleration vector of a car is not simply a constant based on how far the gas pedal is pushed (it depends also on things like speed and gear ratios and fuel), and likewise the force/acceleration vector of the brakes is not a constant either based on how far the brake pedal is pushed in.
Perfect riposte to my claim that only Ford make safe cars and all Fords are safe. Except that isn't what I said at all. In fact it isn't remotely like it, is it?
What you did however claim was that mechanical devices fail in 'safer, more predictable' ways than electronics, and indeed the Ford Pinto is a good counterargument to this, though I'm sure there are many more, such as the Ford / Goodyear problems a few years back, which also had nothing to do with drive-by-wire. You remain wrong, sorry. There have been so many mechnical problems with cars that have killed people in horrible unpredictable ways, while in contrast these drive-by-wire acceleration problems are so incredibly rare that they seem almost impossible to duplicate --- you are dissing drive-by-wire, but the fact is drive-by-wire has a fairly decent track record so far as compared to mechanical failure.
In other news, Mr. Sleedwidge Numbscull of Oxygen Bottling Inc. criticised farmers and the forestry commission for providing free oxygen in the atmosphere, making it 'incredibly hard for private oxygen bottlers to ask people to pay for their oxygen.'
This is a false analogy; unlike media organisations, oxygen isn't funded by taxpayers or private individuals, it really is "just there".
So where does Murdoch's mythical right to extract money from the public come from?
But that is *exactly* what the BBC does - extract money from the public to provide the service. Why is it somehow "better" for goverment to do this (taking your money by force, I should add) than a private individual (voluntarily)? I know it's fashionable to bash "evil" big businesses, but really, you think government is more your friend?
No, you're supposed to shut up. My whole point is that you cannot win when talking to the police.
Let me repeat that: you do not have anything to gain when talking to the police, you can only lose. If you think the risk is small, then sure, talk to the police.
But the summary mentioned a murder inquiry. Why would you want to get involved in such an investigation? You have nothing to win.
To help catch actual bad guys? If everybody followed your advice, it would be basically impossible for the police to ever investigate anything.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks as if the increase in spending on youth projects that I recall (but again can't find details of) in the 1980 s and early 90s happened at a time of falling taxation. So I think your argument is directly contrary to the facts, but I'd love to get my hands on the actual numbers.
BTW, I'm talking about over a much longer period --- I mean, you said yourself, "We've had socialised health care since 1948", so the state has been diverting increasing amounts of income from local initiatives for at least 60 years. 'Later on', as you said, youth programs were added --- i.e. diverting still more income.
As for being "contrary to the facts", well, there are so many variables at play it's difficult to impartially draw conclusions.
I never liked classical music for the first 32 years of my life. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, started liking it. (I'm also not rich.)
It's always been 'around me' in one way or another, and it never rubbed off before at all --- my dad loved it and it was always playing in the house since I can remember, several of my girlfriends happened to like classic music, even flatmates I've roomed with happened to like classical music. Had no effect on me. Then one day I just found myself bored with all the worn-out music I listened to up until my 20s, and all the new music coming out mostly just sounds like rehashed derivative trashy nihilist crap to me ... so I thought I'd try out some classical, and voila, suddenly it clicked with me.
Maybe it's just growing up.
Re "Score:0, Offtopic", it annoys the crap out of me when mods mod admissions/corrections like this negatively --- it's just the poster clarifying the identity of who posted the comment, how can that possibly be "off topic", it's just neutral.
I'd be interested to hear your theories as to how the worldwide recession and decline in religion are caused by UK socialised healthcare.
Isn't it just what you said in your own post ... money that used to be in private hands organised youth clubs and activities via the private / charity / church etc. sectors; nowadays that money gets taxed instead and spent by government on bigger/broader programs (which are also less religion-focused than e.g. a local church). As the state has gotten bigger, it's programs have supplanted more effective grass-roots ones that used to solve the problem at local level in communities, but now money is diverted from those to the state. The bigger the state gets, the less money every other non-state individual or organisation has, it's very simple.
Did you forget to take your meds again.
That should've been "I would never silence my own purely technical opinion."
You might have the right to do this; but consider the consequences; i.e. is it worth potentially losing your job or getting shunted aside?
Depends how good you think you are. If you're any good, you'll find another job, possibly one where you have a voice. If you're just average, and you think it will be hard to find another job, then toe the line.
I would silence my own purely technical opinion. If management disagrees, that's their prerogative, but it's also your prerogative to give impartial technical opinions. If I was the submitter, I would write up a report detailing his "recommendations", outlining why he thinks they would save money, and include a plan for implementation so that it all sounds workable. Submit the report to management and/or the board as e.g. "technical opinion and recommendation on IT solutions for the organisation" or whatever.
It's always better to get your case/viewpoint in writing, even if it goes nowhere. That way, if crap hits the fan (e.g. say it turns out some corruption was involved, for example) it will be clear you were never part of it.
If you are a 'true' technical person, you will always stand by your technical *opinions*. Now *actions* are another thing; as an employee on someone's payroll, you have to follow their orders, end of story, even if you disagree with them. But you don't have to do it quietly. Nor do you have to be happy with it; ultimately, if you think your management are fools, you are better off dusting off your resume and starting to look around for an employer that fits your own views better.
The alternative, if you're so inclined, is to learn to play the political game, climb the ladder, and once you're at the top, change the "strategy". Not for me thanks. Or what I ultimately did, start my own business.
From my experience these types of managers are often also technically clueless; by aligning with MS and allowing MS to 'guide' them, they have a solution that 'even they' can get implemented and thus they can retain their management position and prevent their incompetency from being exposed. The "strategy" they are referring to is the "strategy" of keeping their own jobs. If they had to implement something that might perhaps be more cost-efficient e.g. open source, it would require more knowledge than they have and they'd simply be lost.
I had made the comment half-jokingly, but I looked it up and it turns out you *really are* more likely to be killed by a lawnmower than by a poisonous snake in the US:
http://stats.org/stories/2007/risks_of_lawn_mowing_july17_07.htm
"There were 133 fatalities in 2006 from using lawnmowers of all types, based on a national probability sample of hospitals in the U.S. and its territories. In 2005, there were 406 deaths."
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/mor_con_wit_pow_law_percap-contact-powered-lawnmower-per-capita
The argument about "safety" from "snakes" is PURE bullshit, given the odds of being killed by a snake are virtually nill, and given that the main safety risk is *in your own garden* where you can decide if you want to cut the grass anyway. This just proves that you can get the public to blindly accept anything, no matter how absurd, by telling them it's "for their safety" and mentioning some virtually imaginary and statistically negligible risk to scare them. Some humans may have a built-in fear of snakes, but one person's irrational hysteria doesn't grant them the right to control other people by restricting their basic liberties.
Why no hysterical outcry against lawnmowing? It's not only far more dangerous than snakes, but lawns have numerous other disadvantages: Noise, energy usage, pollution, cost, water usage (lawns are thirsty things), etc.
If you think news is like oxygen, then tell me, why would the BBC need to lower its production in the face of limited budget?
No, news isn't "just there", the person who writes up the initial report has to have food and a roof over their head, and it takes time, totally unlike oxygen. And it often takes travel, too, and management overheads. You are confusing production scarcity with distribution scarcity. News is actually very difficult to report initially, and remains so, but because of the Internet era, the *distribution* of that news has become incredibly cheap and fast and difficult to monopolise (but still not anything like oxygen, because the Internet is actually a big complex network that wasn't created by the Tooth Fairy, it cost a lot of money and still costs a lot of money to keep working). Anyway, because distribution used to be difficult, the old-style media used to fund news *production* (i.e. journalism) from the revenue from news *distribution* (e.g. printing a newspaper). The latter is now very cheap thanks to the Internet, but the former is still expensive and difficult. But to think it's anything like oxygen is sheer moronity. IT COSTS MONEY TO PRODUCE.
There are less than 10 deaths a year in the US from snake bites; frankly that seems a little hysterical to me. You're probably more likely to die in some kind of freak lawnmower accident.
If someone has a tacky garden, the neighbours are welcome to follow various recourses to coerce that person to improve their garden ... write him little letters, ask him nicely, complain about it, help him pay for garden services, whatever ... I draw the line though at abusing government structures to create laws to force others to plant in their garden what you want to see there. It is morally wrong, no matter how much it "affects your property values".
Can your land i.e. title deed actually be taken away from you for non-payment of services, i.e. property taxes?
the US is in many way under-regulated (eg. the banking system,
Guess again. Our banking system is one of our most heavily-regulated industries, right up there with medicine and operating nuclear power plants.
-jcr
Yup; this propaganda has been spread recently by some who seek to broaden their powers that the cause of all this problem was an "unregulated" industry, which is simply false. Unfortunately propaganda still works well in this day and age, since most people just repeat whatever they hear.
All those evil bankers were motivated by a quick payoff that was enabled by not owning the loans anymore.
Yup, that's it in short. They effective perpetrated a kind of fraud by taking on high-risk debt, deliberately hiding and obfuscating that the debt was high risk, and reselling the debt. This doesn't happen by accident, and probably in some cases was already illegal in some way or another, although nobody's been prosecuted.
Your words imply that one needs merely to add regulation. I'm just pointing out that one can add regulation generously and not improve (perhaps even make the problem worse!) the situation.
Yup. Unfortunately most people hear the words "unregulated" or "under-regulated" and get scared, since those words are deliberately used to make it sound like someone else is able to do whatever bad thing they want. That's the whole point of using these 'scary-sounding' labels, to write government a blank cheque to pass whatever "regulation" happens to grant themselves more power and a bigger slice of that tax pie (which is starting to strain).
To me there seems a dangerous lack of discretion on the part of administrators, as to when laws ought, and more importantly, ought not to be applied.
Here's the thing, times are tough, so administrators are under pressure to 'justify their salaries'. If you're an administrator in charge of petty things like this, and you basically have little better to do, you will ultimately lose your job if you can't find a way to 'look busy'. So if you don't have anything truly useful to do, you can either lose your job and save taxpayers some money, or you can start "making work" by behaving like the "lawn police" and pursuing frivolous cases. Ultimately that's what it's about.
The most amazing thing about all this is that these peoples' salaries are being funded by a deficit while unemployment is also high: I mean, if society had excess cash to waste on pursuing cases like this, it would be one thing, but when you don't have the excess cash, these are precisely the kinds of state administrator jobs that should be cut first.
Excessive regulations are indeed a core part of the problem, since they themselves are often passed by other administrators trying to "justify their salaries", and then they need still more money to enforce. They also give administators a "blunt tool" to go after just about anyone they feel like, since almost everyone breaks some stupid law or 'code' every single day.
Uhhhh... I believe you fail at basic physics.
Except cars need more than "basic" physics to model and understand. A car is not a point mass. It's a collection of separated components that interact, with each subject to its own forces and constraints. There are also rotational acceleration components. Outputs are also not static, they are dependent on other inputs and there feedbacks between the various inputs and outputs of the different components, which themselves can even change based on the states of other components. The force/acceleration vector of a car is not simply a constant based on how far the gas pedal is pushed (it depends also on things like speed and gear ratios and fuel), and likewise the force/acceleration vector of the brakes is not a constant either based on how far the brake pedal is pushed in.
Expressing an acceleration in velocity units
What's worse than seeing such an incredibly ignorant error, is seeing it on slashdot and not somewhere like YouTube or Digg :/
Perfect riposte to my claim that only Ford make safe cars and all Fords are safe. Except that isn't what I said at all. In fact it isn't remotely like it, is it?
What you did however claim was that mechanical devices fail in 'safer, more predictable' ways than electronics, and indeed the Ford Pinto is a good counterargument to this, though I'm sure there are many more, such as the Ford / Goodyear problems a few years back, which also had nothing to do with drive-by-wire. You remain wrong, sorry. There have been so many mechnical problems with cars that have killed people in horrible unpredictable ways, while in contrast these drive-by-wire acceleration problems are so incredibly rare that they seem almost impossible to duplicate --- you are dissing drive-by-wire, but the fact is drive-by-wire has a fairly decent track record so far as compared to mechanical failure.
In other news, Mr. Sleedwidge Numbscull of Oxygen Bottling Inc. criticised farmers and the forestry commission for providing free oxygen in the atmosphere, making it 'incredibly hard for private oxygen bottlers to ask people to pay for their oxygen.'
This is a false analogy; unlike media organisations, oxygen isn't funded by taxpayers or private individuals, it really is "just there".
So where does Murdoch's mythical right to extract money from the public come from?
But that is *exactly* what the BBC does - extract money from the public to provide the service. Why is it somehow "better" for goverment to do this (taking your money by force, I should add) than a private individual (voluntarily)? I know it's fashionable to bash "evil" big businesses, but really, you think government is more your friend?
I actually liked the ACLU until I followed that link. Thanks a lot. Now I'm starting to wonder if they're any less crazy than the Ron Paul fanatics.
You must work for the government.
No, you're supposed to shut up. My whole point is that you cannot win when talking to the police.
Let me repeat that: you do not have anything to gain when talking to the police, you can only lose. If you think the risk is small, then sure, talk to the police.
But the summary mentioned a murder inquiry. Why would you want to get involved in such an investigation? You have nothing to win.
To help catch actual bad guys? If everybody followed your advice, it would be basically impossible for the police to ever investigate anything.