"If you're so heavily specialized in food that another country is dependent on you, you're likely to be behind in other areas that are critical for waging war"
I know, but that's why I mentioned invasion. E.g. say the US became dependent on Africa for cheap food --- a country like China could militarily roll over pretty much any African country in no time at all.
I'm not nearly convinced food production could be ramped up as quickly as would be necessary. It'll take an absolute minimum of a year to two years to get food production even nearly up to capacity... you need to allocate land, people, create and buy equipment, then the stuff *still* takes ages to grow... never mind the skills you'll have lost in the meantime. Remember, we're talking about food for over 300,000,000 people. China could probably take over most of Africa (for example) in well under a year if it planned a major serious invasion.
no one at the top is ANY smarter than your common worker, they just are more privileged.
I started my now succeeding and growing business from absolutely nothing but hard, hard work - nearly a decade of non-stop 90-hour work weeks, all the while scrimping and saving and living like a poor person, while burning through multiple relationships and sacrificing all manner of quality of life. I guess I must've missed it when they were handing out all those "privileges".
Why do you assume I refer to government intervention? You seem to have a lot of preconceived notions.
Because government intervention is by definition what is being talked about when people use phrases like "seizing the means of production" (that's just called "the English language"), and you yourself implied this too by responding by referring to the "red menace", again, government intervention.
If you *really* meant new private business opportunities being opened up, it isn't what you said, which either means you're very bad at communicating (if *everybody* misunderstands you, it isn't them), or you're just backpedalling now.
Is this a joke? Do you have any clue at all how much damage and human suffering has genuinely been (and continues to be) caused by that "red menace" you seem to scoff off as paranoia? You actually go into countries like North Korea and Cuba and spend some time living amongst the people and then laugh at them for being "scared of the Red Menace" too. This isn't some abstract thing.
The goats can't generate fertilizer that wasn't in the system already, as the fertilizer is just the grass itself re-processed. The only extra fertilizer is that that they'll bring in in their digestive systems when they're trucked in, but this will average out against that which they take out again when they leave.
Money which could have been used to keep your children healthy, or educate them, or yes, even fight terrorism.
How do you plan for people to be able to pay to keep their children healthy and educate them when they lose their jobs because the tax burden and associated relative uncompetitiveness caused those companies to go out of business, and all the jobs to move overseas to countries that are more competitive? Good luck with that. Those "evil businesses" are the reason you have a job at all.
The only valid reason for a nation to subsidize food production is if it's regarded as a national security issue. US farmers would never be able to produce food as cheaply as e.g. farmers in Africa or Asia; if left purely to the free market, in theory, US food production will drop dramatically in the face of cheap food imports. This is "good" in that food would be much cheaper. However, since food is such a basic necessity, it creates a dependency on foreign nations that would give them unnecessary amounts of power; for example, if the US were dependent on China for food, or if the US were dependent on other countries for food that China invaded (as they have no strong military), it would give China the ability to cut off a big chunk of the US's food supply, thereby weakening it (e.g. in preparation for taking over).
I'm a libertarian and free market advocate, but I can see some argument for maintaining an otherwise uncompetitive local food production capacity.
Could you please be clearer about distinguishing between "anti-tax" (as in, wants no taxes at all) vs "anti-tax" (as in, wants taxes lowered). You can't conflate the two. Getting rid of taxes entirely could be a defense disaster for a country, but nobody here seems to be calling for that; rather, lower taxes allow businesses to thrive and thus employment opportunities and wealth to be created. This obviously *helps* pay for a war.
90% of a student's opinion of a teacher is based on the grades they receive.
Gosh, I would be very hesitant to trust students to evaluate teachers, that definitely isn't what I meant - I meant people like principals (primarily), and perhaps secondarily, other teachers who teach at that school. Student feedback might be one small component in evaluating a teacher, but I would weight it quite low, and look at it only when it seems to help show up potential problems with the evaluation process. Teachers and principals are probably on average not too bad at evaluating teachers. If a principal really is incapable of judging a teacher, it also would mean he is a lousy principal, and should probably also be fired by his boss.
Is there any reasonable and objective way to determine a teacher's performance that is independent of the students in her classroom?
Like it or not, by far the best thing we have available for evaluating the quality of a teacher, is another human being's judgment. I realise it's not perfect, but it only makes sense to choose the "best available" in the absence of a perfect system. Generally the existing checks and balances would prevent most cases of outright abuse.
Humans are actually generally awesome at tasks like being able to just watch a teacher for a while and say, "wow, this one is fantastic" or "hey, that one sucks piles"... *no* known machine or "objective method" can even come remotely close. So frankly, I don't know how we got led so badly astray that we no longer follow such a simple, logical, obvious method. PC-ness run amok, maybe.
Surely you do at least need to understand the theoretical lower bound performance that your database software will be able to return your requested sorted data? And also what you need to do (what it needs) to allow it to be able to give the best performance? And also when you would need to restructure your data in other ways when the lower bound theoretical performance will not be fast enough? And also how to approach tracking down the source of the bottlenecks when your major database application is slow?
In order to be able to do any of these things even half effectively, you need to be "intimately familiar" with sorting algorithms to the point that you can grasp these things quickly as pure *intuition*.
Unless you've only ever written small database apps that don't deal with large datasets.
"In a large OO project you might have hundreds of types. Creating meaningful prefixes for all of them is going to be next to impossible, and having obj at the front of everything is redundant"
I didn't know that HN forced you to create prefixes for every type. Isn't this a straw-man?
So you've never worked on a real programming project then, i.e. that went on for years, had at least hundreds of thousands of lines of code, involved multiple programmers, and involved a fair bit programmer turnover i.e. old programmers leaving and new programmers joining?
A deep understanding of sorting algorithms is usually a kind of 'proxy' measure of a proper understanding of the underlying principles of performance that a programmer must know to write decent code... e.g. programmers who don't properly understand quicksort usually also don't understand basic things O(log n), O(n), O(n^2) etc., and end up writing crappy code as a habit. It's not about having to write sorting routines every day, but it is about having a continual understanding, in every algorithm you implement, what overall performance you'd expect to get out of it, and what other strategies would be far better.
Writing good tight code is a habit that a good programmers gets into and just does all the time.
Frankly I don't mind if the market is swamped with arrogant young programmers who think they don't need to know these things anymore; this is why us slightly older programmers will be able to earn far more money, because companies really do still need the skills of people who do actually know these things, even if programmers think they don't need to know them.
So Jim gets a loan, or looks for investors, or teams up with a third party to strengthen his position, or looks for other ways to differentiate his product(s), or all of the above.
"Afterward, of course, the perpetrators jack their prices beyond what it should be, slow R&D so they can sell their old stuff faster and then set about abusing the market as a monopoly unimpeded."
As long as there's someone bigger than you out there (and there pretty much always is), this will never be sustainable, so I wouldn't worry too much.
To put it still another way: Consider the relative costs of (a) buying and installing a hub and running a network cable between you and your neighbor's computer, and (b) actually transmitting data between the two computers on your new little network. You could probably transfer a few billion HD movies before the variable cost of 'b' (basically a miniscule amount of electricity to run the NICs) even started to approach the cost of 'a'. This is absolutely nothing like electricity; you're probably confusing the two because telecomms and electricity both happen to involve cables to your home.
Actually no; the relative proportional marginal cost of generating and distributing energy is much higher than the relative proportional marginal cost of moving bits over a line. IOW it makes sense to meter energy proportional to usage because the marginal unit cost of production is similarly proportional. The marginal cost of transferring one more packet between two computers , OTOH, is virtually nil.
Comparing communications with energy is at best a metaphor, or analogy, both of which are extremely poor, flawed tools for comparing *business models*.
So why was nobody else carrying a gun in the first place? A real man's duty is to protect himself, his family and his community.
I remember when people yearned for the days "when men were men". They actually still remembered those days. But I haven't heard that in a long time though... it seems the new generation have now forgotten that 'men' ever were 'men' - people don't even have a concept of what that means anymore, now we're a bunch of girly-men who just 'wait for the cavalry'. It's a very dangerous situation. It's not completely surprising though, as our culture has developed a strong anti-male streak where we vilify traditional male behaviour.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you're so heavily specialized in food that another country is dependent on you, you're likely to be behind in other areas that are critical for waging war"
I know, but that's why I mentioned invasion. E.g. say the US became dependent on Africa for cheap food --- a country like China could militarily roll over pretty much any African country in no time at all.
I'm not nearly convinced food production could be ramped up as quickly as would be necessary. It'll take an absolute minimum of a year to two years to get food production even nearly up to capacity ... you need to allocate land, people, create and buy equipment, then the stuff *still* takes ages to grow ... never mind the skills you'll have lost in the meantime. Remember, we're talking about food for over 300,000,000 people. China could probably take over most of Africa (for example) in well under a year if it planned a major serious invasion.
So, again, how much will the enforcement of these new rules cost, per year?
Hey, maybe it's part of that 'job creation' Obama is talking about - you know, create still more jobs for still more useless bureaucrats.
It's a toss-up as to whether it might be more worthwhile to pay all these people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them in again over and over.
no one at the top is ANY smarter than your common worker, they just are more privileged.
I started my now succeeding and growing business from absolutely nothing but hard, hard work - nearly a decade of non-stop 90-hour work weeks, all the while scrimping and saving and living like a poor person, while burning through multiple relationships and sacrificing all manner of quality of life. I guess I must've missed it when they were handing out all those "privileges".
Why do you assume I refer to government intervention? You seem to have a lot of preconceived notions.
Because government intervention is by definition what is being talked about when people use phrases like "seizing the means of production" (that's just called "the English language"), and you yourself implied this too by responding by referring to the "red menace", again, government intervention.
If you *really* meant new private business opportunities being opened up, it isn't what you said, which either means you're very bad at communicating (if *everybody* misunderstands you, it isn't them), or you're just backpedalling now.
Still running scared of the Red Menace, I see.
Is this a joke? Do you have any clue at all how much damage and human suffering has genuinely been (and continues to be) caused by that "red menace" you seem to scoff off as paranoia? You actually go into countries like North Korea and Cuba and spend some time living amongst the people and then laugh at them for being "scared of the Red Menace" too. This isn't some abstract thing.
The goats can't generate fertilizer that wasn't in the system already, as the fertilizer is just the grass itself re-processed. The only extra fertilizer is that that they'll bring in in their digestive systems when they're trucked in, but this will average out against that which they take out again when they leave.
Money which could have been used to keep your children healthy, or educate them, or yes, even fight terrorism.
How do you plan for people to be able to pay to keep their children healthy and educate them when they lose their jobs because the tax burden and associated relative uncompetitiveness caused those companies to go out of business, and all the jobs to move overseas to countries that are more competitive? Good luck with that. Those "evil businesses" are the reason you have a job at all.
The only valid reason for a nation to subsidize food production is if it's regarded as a national security issue. US farmers would never be able to produce food as cheaply as e.g. farmers in Africa or Asia; if left purely to the free market, in theory, US food production will drop dramatically in the face of cheap food imports. This is "good" in that food would be much cheaper. However, since food is such a basic necessity, it creates a dependency on foreign nations that would give them unnecessary amounts of power; for example, if the US were dependent on China for food, or if the US were dependent on other countries for food that China invaded (as they have no strong military), it would give China the ability to cut off a big chunk of the US's food supply, thereby weakening it (e.g. in preparation for taking over).
I'm a libertarian and free market advocate, but I can see some argument for maintaining an otherwise uncompetitive local food production capacity.
Could you please be clearer about distinguishing between "anti-tax" (as in, wants no taxes at all) vs "anti-tax" (as in, wants taxes lowered). You can't conflate the two. Getting rid of taxes entirely could be a defense disaster for a country, but nobody here seems to be calling for that; rather, lower taxes allow businesses to thrive and thus employment opportunities and wealth to be created. This obviously *helps* pay for a war.
By "screwing", I presume you mean "creating jobs"?
90% of a student's opinion of a teacher is based on the grades they receive.
Gosh, I would be very hesitant to trust students to evaluate teachers, that definitely isn't what I meant - I meant people like principals (primarily), and perhaps secondarily, other teachers who teach at that school. Student feedback might be one small component in evaluating a teacher, but I would weight it quite low, and look at it only when it seems to help show up potential problems with the evaluation process. Teachers and principals are probably on average not too bad at evaluating teachers. If a principal really is incapable of judging a teacher, it also would mean he is a lousy principal, and should probably also be fired by his boss.
Is there any reasonable and objective way to determine a teacher's performance that is independent of the students in her classroom?
Like it or not, by far the best thing we have available for evaluating the quality of a teacher, is another human being's judgment. I realise it's not perfect, but it only makes sense to choose the "best available" in the absence of a perfect system. Generally the existing checks and balances would prevent most cases of outright abuse.
Humans are actually generally awesome at tasks like being able to just watch a teacher for a while and say, "wow, this one is fantastic" or "hey, that one sucks piles" ... *no* known machine or "objective method" can even come remotely close. So frankly, I don't know how we got led so badly astray that we no longer follow such a simple, logical, obvious method. PC-ness run amok, maybe.
How old (young) are you? It looks quite accurate to me. Heck, I still remember playing 'TV games' on our old black and white TV.
Surely you do at least need to understand the theoretical lower bound performance that your database software will be able to return your requested sorted data? And also what you need to do (what it needs) to allow it to be able to give the best performance? And also when you would need to restructure your data in other ways when the lower bound theoretical performance will not be fast enough? And also how to approach tracking down the source of the bottlenecks when your major database application is slow?
In order to be able to do any of these things even half effectively, you need to be "intimately familiar" with sorting algorithms to the point that you can grasp these things quickly as pure *intuition*.
Unless you've only ever written small database apps that don't deal with large datasets.
"In a large OO project you might have hundreds of types. Creating meaningful prefixes for all of them is going to be next to impossible, and having obj at the front of everything is redundant"
I didn't know that HN forced you to create prefixes for every type. Isn't this a straw-man?
So you've never worked on a real programming project then, i.e. that went on for years, had at least hundreds of thousands of lines of code, involved multiple programmers, and involved a fair bit programmer turnover i.e. old programmers leaving and new programmers joining?
Yeah, I've found many too.
A deep understanding of sorting algorithms is usually a kind of 'proxy' measure of a proper understanding of the underlying principles of performance that a programmer must know to write decent code ... e.g. programmers who don't properly understand quicksort usually also don't understand basic things O(log n), O(n), O(n^2) etc., and end up writing crappy code as a habit. It's not about having to write sorting routines every day, but it is about having a continual understanding, in every algorithm you implement, what overall performance you'd expect to get out of it, and what other strategies would be far better.
Writing good tight code is a habit that a good programmers gets into and just does all the time.
Frankly I don't mind if the market is swamped with arrogant young programmers who think they don't need to know these things anymore; this is why us slightly older programmers will be able to earn far more money, because companies really do still need the skills of people who do actually know these things, even if programmers think they don't need to know them.
So Jim gets a loan, or looks for investors, or teams up with a third party to strengthen his position, or looks for other ways to differentiate his product(s), or all of the above.
"Afterward, of course, the perpetrators jack their prices beyond what it should be, slow R&D so they can sell their old stuff faster and then set about abusing the market as a monopoly unimpeded."
As long as there's someone bigger than you out there (and there pretty much always is), this will never be sustainable, so I wouldn't worry too much.
To put it still another way: Consider the relative costs of (a) buying and installing a hub and running a network cable between you and your neighbor's computer, and (b) actually transmitting data between the two computers on your new little network. You could probably transfer a few billion HD movies before the variable cost of 'b' (basically a miniscule amount of electricity to run the NICs) even started to approach the cost of 'a'. This is absolutely nothing like electricity; you're probably confusing the two because telecomms and electricity both happen to involve cables to your home.
Put another way, because of the above, bandwidth is actually much closer to a "rent" model than electricity.
Actually no; the relative proportional marginal cost of generating and distributing energy is much higher than the relative proportional marginal cost of moving bits over a line. IOW it makes sense to meter energy proportional to usage because the marginal unit cost of production is similarly proportional. The marginal cost of transferring one more packet between two computers , OTOH, is virtually nil.
Comparing communications with energy is at best a metaphor, or analogy, both of which are extremely poor, flawed tools for comparing *business models*.
So why was nobody else carrying a gun in the first place? A real man's duty is to protect himself, his family and his community.
I remember when people yearned for the days "when men were men". They actually still remembered those days. But I haven't heard that in a long time though ... it seems the new generation have now forgotten that 'men' ever were 'men' - people don't even have a concept of what that means anymore, now we're a bunch of girly-men who just 'wait for the cavalry'. It's a very dangerous situation. It's not completely surprising though, as our culture has developed a strong anti-male streak where we vilify traditional male behaviour.
Wow. Please, never have children.
You're saying people with good values shouldn't have children? I don't get it.