Cull all bright people. Intelligence produces the sort of civilisation which allows such concentrations of population, and the high number of people suffering as a result. If we were to administer an intelligence test and wipe the top 10% of people at each stage, nature would do the rest.
I'm mocking the way you compare Britain and the USSR. It appears your reading comprehension is as bad as your critical thinking. No surprise that you have the beliefs that you do - you're just not a very intelligent person.
Why do you think I don't even understand the field? Everything I've said is accurate, everything they've said is accurate, and all I'm saying is that I don't get what the deal is with writing a big paper about it. You've suggested that it's about socially engineering the PHBs rather than informing academia, which is fair enough... but that's not a "paper" in the way I think of it, then.
1. Changing the dopant in a transistor is undetectable by visual inspection - clearly;
2. Randomness isn't the same as predictability.
I skimmed through the paper thinking that the innovation was that they'd actually been able to modify an Intel chip. But they appear to be saying little more than that you can manufacture a chip "wrongly" (after a LOT of waffle - you'd never get away with this writing math papers!).
Roll up! roll up! Here we have someone who not only has experience of both Britain in the 1970s and Soviet Russia, but can confirm first-hand that "the queues were as bad if not worse" under the oldest Western democracy.
Do you have any fucking idea how Soviet Russia was run, comrade? If you tried to set up a trade union in the style of 1970s Britain, you'd be taken on a very quick trip to a colder oblast. The USSR began its death spiral in the late '70s because it had become a corrupt gerontocracy, and Britain was in trouble because the typically stupid Tories had got involved in pissing off the whole Middle East to suck US dick and suddenly found itself without cheap natural resources.
Somehow - SOMEHOW - this was rewritten by ideological zealots to be something to do with trade unions, rather than geopolitics and poor management.
There are ways in which BT and Ofcom are certainly in bed with each other, such as on issues of RFI - a quick search for documents e.g. on PLT will reveal that Ofcom does little more than echo the vendor (mostly BT!) line.
Then there is the question of prices being regulated upward so that BT do not appear too competitive. This is always a crap method of regulating any ex-monopoly, but it's even more insidious when it applies to wholesale services: to repeat my previous example, the regulated high cost of BT Centrals were (are?) priced in such a way as to favour larger ISPs - the largest of all being BT Retail. And there's no way a smaller ISP could use third party infrastructure, because third parties aren't required to rent out their lines! So what the regulation was really doing is guaranteeing a safer income for BT Retail.
This is why the brilliant ISPs like A&A are both expensive and unusual, with the remainder e.g. Be having to be absorbed to remain sustainable.
Eh, perhaps your definition of "counterpart" is different from mine.
The functional equivalents to poorly maintained council housing are the low rent apartments and shared accommodation provided by slumlords, except that you're more likely to be evicted from or have your rent increased in the latter.
The problem isn't that older people in (decent) old council housing got to cash in. It's the fact that there isn't new similar accommodation affordable to newer generations. Make sense?
oh god so annoying, i thought I'd sent my response...
annyway, to vaguely summarise what i said, no, I am fairly old, disagree on BT - pretty much same service immediately before/after privatisation... leyland i can kinda believe: family worked for Datsun in '70s, british industry has always been bollocks with feedback + incremental improvements, but i think that's a feature of the national culture rather than public vsprivate, which is why things have not improved much here, and indeed to treat the problem as ideological was thatcher's great mistake.
Well, the second factor is completely irrelevant, and the first can only really be argued for outlying areas, where it was assumed that - being an essential service - subsidy was acceptable. It hasn't suddenly cost that much more to send shit from A to B in the last decade - especially not if you consider that the government doesn't need to charge itself fuel duty (money goes from government to government, posted as an expense in one book and income in another - it's daft!), which is by far the largest proportion of recent increase in fuel costs. As for the third, there is more shit being mailed than ever - just not letters! But a lot of the processing has been outsourced through just enough deregulation to let other businesses take all the profitable parts of the work while leaving the rest to Royal Mail.
The mail is one of those services that's too big to fail. So it's a matter of a sufficiently big private sector group offering a sufficiently large bribe that it will be guaranteed to keep all the profits but be able to socialise all the losses.
Most of the big industry losses of the late '70s were due to worldwide recession and inflation following the oil crisis, and had nothing to do with government ownership. Private firms across the West were suffering similarly. We don't blame all the losses by big private firms since the 2007 collapse on vaguely handwaved "capitalism" either, do we? Instead, we look for the specific causes.
BA is the archetypal illustration of policy driven by ideology: it was made profitable *before* sell-off... then sold off anyway.
BT has been so heavily regulated that it's almost a waste of time to regard it as anything but a government-protected leech. Since we're not about to let a hundred firms dig up roads just for the sake of a forced free market experiment, of course we don't let everyone offer a cable service - not that it would be very practical anyway, as the barrier to entry is so high that your smaller companies tend to either remain geographically very limited or get bought up by the big boys within a few years as funding runs out (anyone from Nynex to Be).
I couldn't disagree more. The Housing Act 1988, buy-to-let mortgages, and council house sell-offs have made property inaccessible and shot up the welfare budget as Local Housing Allowance essentially becomes a subsidy for landlords determined by *private market* rates. What's more, these changes, which didn't really produce a significant effect on the market until recovery from recession in the mid-'90s, both produced the housing boom of the early 2000s and contributed hugely toward the collapse of 2007, bailouts, &c.
What is true is that some councils did a fucking awful job of maintaining property. Their private counterparts are the slumlords who can take advantage of a reduced set of tenant rights. In terms of quality of new builds, there are much stricter standards which apply to both sectors (I'm from a family of quantity surveyors!), but the majority of lower income tenants don't live in recent developments because (with the exception of Labour doing the "priority for essential workers" thing a few years ago) priority remains based on ability to afford, and - of course - everyone wants the new stuff.
That's explained by the 35 years of technological progress which BT could take advantage of.
And I've seen multiple people have to wait multiple months for a BT install in the last 5 years - or even to fix damage to the pole outside their house.
Stop giving up your life to big business, and they'll stop being able to tear you a new one.
This isn't like that other article, where the British government is selling off a natural monopoly so you're forced to use a particular business. This is you thinking that you are entitled to get Zuckerberg to do anything more than widen the smile on his deservedly smug face.
OK, so you're ignoring 35 years of technological progress and blaming higher costs of telecoms equipment in the late '70s on government ownership. Superb.
And if you've never had to wait multiple months for a working BT connection in the UK then perhaps you've never moved outside of London. Meanwhile, many Internet services require you to rent their equipment, so the theme there remains (can you think of why it's sometimes a good idea to demand only approved equipment at the consumer end?) - perhaps in thirty years time POTS/cable/fibre modems will be so commoditised that no ISP ever cares, but clearly it has nothing to do with e.g. whether Sky is privately owned.
EDF retail's billing systems are a complete fucking joke. They'd adjust my direct debit based on when in the month I gave them an estimated reading, rather than behaving as if DD payments were spread throughout the month. After a couple of months I worked out when to supply them to ensure they stopped trying to get me supplying them with interest-free credit. Absolutely pathetic.
Slashdot Mirror
Cull all bright people. Intelligence produces the sort of civilisation which allows such concentrations of population, and the high number of people suffering as a result. If we were to administer an intelligence test and wipe the top 10% of people at each stage, nature would do the rest.
I vote to repeal the laws to protect all industrialists. Private property is an anachronism for people of low intelligence.
"you think"
"more likely"
Ah, argument by guesswork. Well done!
All those Amazon outlets popping up on the high street really are rendering... oh wait.
Also Ayn Rand yellow alert for "horse and buggy" analogy. It makes you sound like you're fresh out of high school.
I'm mocking the way you compare Britain and the USSR. It appears your reading comprehension is as bad as your critical thinking. No surprise that you have the beliefs that you do - you're just not a very intelligent person.
...treat them like human-controlled robots. Seems sensible to me.
Why do you think I don't even understand the field? Everything I've said is accurate, everything they've said is accurate, and all I'm saying is that I don't get what the deal is with writing a big paper about it. You've suggested that it's about socially engineering the PHBs rather than informing academia, which is fair enough... but that's not a "paper" in the way I think of it, then.
The "discoveries" in this paper are:
1) A chemical change is undetectable by visual inspection;
2) Reducing the number of bits used for randomisation may be undetectable.
That's not worth a multi-page paper, is it?
1. Changing the dopant in a transistor is undetectable by visual inspection - clearly;
2. Randomness isn't the same as predictability.
I skimmed through the paper thinking that the innovation was that they'd actually been able to modify an Intel chip. But they appear to be saying little more than that you can manufacture a chip "wrongly" (after a LOT of waffle - you'd never get away with this writing math papers!).
If you modify a chip, you can make it behave differently?
What's the news here please?
Roll up! roll up! Here we have someone who not only has experience of both Britain in the 1970s and Soviet Russia, but can confirm first-hand that "the queues were as bad if not worse" under the oldest Western democracy.
Do you have any fucking idea how Soviet Russia was run, comrade? If you tried to set up a trade union in the style of 1970s Britain, you'd be taken on a very quick trip to a colder oblast. The USSR began its death spiral in the late '70s because it had become a corrupt gerontocracy, and Britain was in trouble because the typically stupid Tories had got involved in pissing off the whole Middle East to suck US dick and suddenly found itself without cheap natural resources.
Somehow - SOMEHOW - this was rewritten by ideological zealots to be something to do with trade unions, rather than geopolitics and poor management.
You appear to be seriously suggesting that we build competing networks of rail tracks... somehow. You may be suffering from a religious delusion.
P. sure that was a typo for "re-nationalised".
My opinion is that the sun will continue burning for another 24 hours.
OH SHIT YOU'RE IN TROUBLE NOW.
I suppose it depends how you look at BT.
There are ways in which BT and Ofcom are certainly in bed with each other, such as on issues of RFI - a quick search for documents e.g. on PLT will reveal that Ofcom does little more than echo the vendor (mostly BT!) line.
Then there is the question of prices being regulated upward so that BT do not appear too competitive. This is always a crap method of regulating any ex-monopoly, but it's even more insidious when it applies to wholesale services: to repeat my previous example, the regulated high cost of BT Centrals were (are?) priced in such a way as to favour larger ISPs - the largest of all being BT Retail. And there's no way a smaller ISP could use third party infrastructure, because third parties aren't required to rent out their lines! So what the regulation was really doing is guaranteeing a safer income for BT Retail.
This is why the brilliant ISPs like A&A are both expensive and unusual, with the remainder e.g. Be having to be absorbed to remain sustainable.
Eh, perhaps your definition of "counterpart" is different from mine.
The functional equivalents to poorly maintained council housing are the low rent apartments and shared accommodation provided by slumlords, except that you're more likely to be evicted from or have your rent increased in the latter.
The problem isn't that older people in (decent) old council housing got to cash in. It's the fact that there isn't new similar accommodation affordable to newer generations. Make sense?
oh god so annoying, i thought I'd sent my response...
annyway, to vaguely summarise what i said, no, I am fairly old, disagree on BT - pretty much same service immediately before/after privatisation... leyland i can kinda believe: family worked for Datsun in '70s, british industry has always been bollocks with feedback + incremental improvements, but i think that's a feature of the national culture rather than public vsprivate, which is why things have not improved much here, and indeed to treat the problem as ideological was thatcher's great mistake.
Well, the second factor is completely irrelevant, and the first can only really be argued for outlying areas, where it was assumed that - being an essential service - subsidy was acceptable. It hasn't suddenly cost that much more to send shit from A to B in the last decade - especially not if you consider that the government doesn't need to charge itself fuel duty (money goes from government to government, posted as an expense in one book and income in another - it's daft!), which is by far the largest proportion of recent increase in fuel costs. As for the third, there is more shit being mailed than ever - just not letters! But a lot of the processing has been outsourced through just enough deregulation to let other businesses take all the profitable parts of the work while leaving the rest to Royal Mail.
The mail is one of those services that's too big to fail. So it's a matter of a sufficiently big private sector group offering a sufficiently large bribe that it will be guaranteed to keep all the profits but be able to socialise all the losses.
Most of the big industry losses of the late '70s were due to worldwide recession and inflation following the oil crisis, and had nothing to do with government ownership. Private firms across the West were suffering similarly. We don't blame all the losses by big private firms since the 2007 collapse on vaguely handwaved "capitalism" either, do we? Instead, we look for the specific causes.
BA is the archetypal illustration of policy driven by ideology: it was made profitable *before* sell-off... then sold off anyway.
BT has been so heavily regulated that it's almost a waste of time to regard it as anything but a government-protected leech. Since we're not about to let a hundred firms dig up roads just for the sake of a forced free market experiment, of course we don't let everyone offer a cable service - not that it would be very practical anyway, as the barrier to entry is so high that your smaller companies tend to either remain geographically very limited or get bought up by the big boys within a few years as funding runs out (anyone from Nynex to Be).
I couldn't disagree more. The Housing Act 1988, buy-to-let mortgages, and council house sell-offs have made property inaccessible and shot up the welfare budget as Local Housing Allowance essentially becomes a subsidy for landlords determined by *private market* rates. What's more, these changes, which didn't really produce a significant effect on the market until recovery from recession in the mid-'90s, both produced the housing boom of the early 2000s and contributed hugely toward the collapse of 2007, bailouts, &c.
What is true is that some councils did a fucking awful job of maintaining property. Their private counterparts are the slumlords who can take advantage of a reduced set of tenant rights. In terms of quality of new builds, there are much stricter standards which apply to both sectors (I'm from a family of quantity surveyors!), but the majority of lower income tenants don't live in recent developments because (with the exception of Labour doing the "priority for essential workers" thing a few years ago) priority remains based on ability to afford, and - of course - everyone wants the new stuff.
And yet could somehow get everyone else to do as they're told. So inferior!
Eh, leaving someone to die is as good as killing them.
But please stop reading Daily Mail propaganda. You have no idea what you're talking about, but I worry that you sincerely believe what you say.
That's explained by the 35 years of technological progress which BT could take advantage of.
And I've seen multiple people have to wait multiple months for a BT install in the last 5 years - or even to fix damage to the pole outside their house.
Stop giving up your life to big business, and they'll stop being able to tear you a new one.
This isn't like that other article, where the British government is selling off a natural monopoly so you're forced to use a particular business. This is you thinking that you are entitled to get Zuckerberg to do anything more than widen the smile on his deservedly smug face.
OK, so you're ignoring 35 years of technological progress and blaming higher costs of telecoms equipment in the late '70s on government ownership. Superb.
And if you've never had to wait multiple months for a working BT connection in the UK then perhaps you've never moved outside of London. Meanwhile, many Internet services require you to rent their equipment, so the theme there remains (can you think of why it's sometimes a good idea to demand only approved equipment at the consumer end?) - perhaps in thirty years time POTS/cable/fibre modems will be so commoditised that no ISP ever cares, but clearly it has nothing to do with e.g. whether Sky is privately owned.
EDF retail's billing systems are a complete fucking joke. They'd adjust my direct debit based on when in the month I gave them an estimated reading, rather than behaving as if DD payments were spread throughout the month. After a couple of months I worked out when to supply them to ensure they stopped trying to get me supplying them with interest-free credit. Absolutely pathetic.