[North Vietnamese diplomat:] Mr. McNamara, you must never have read a history book. If you had, you'd know we weren't pawns of the Chinese and the Russians... Don't you understand that we've been fighting the Chinese for a thousand years?
What, then, do you propose as the cure for raw tribalism? Limiting government power merely puts the tribal in command of unfettered tribes called "corporations", who like all tribes eliminate the competition and somehow rarely stop the predation: they start hurting the people paying them, their supposed customers. Establishing religions substitutes "churches". Republics and democracies at least diffuse tribes, if they're given any actual power. What other organization has a prayer of not devolving into a tribe?
That "from each...to each" maxim has older roots than you think, and probably very much closer to home.
I take it that there's no objection to spending tax money to provide for the general welfare of the United States, then? Let's pick full-on individual and family welfare payments to discuss—what people get when their unemployment insurance has run out and they still can't find a job.
Option 1: no welfare payments. Those who can find a job eat. Those who can't, beg, starve or steal.
Option 2: welfare payments. Those who can't find a job still eat. Nobody has to beg, starve or steal.
A third option would be reviving the WPA, which seems to draw even more vociferous objections from those who object to welfare.
For the people who can't be bothered to find a job, the no-welfare argument is: if they steal for food, toss them in prison even though that's far more expensive. If they don't steal or beg, let them starve.
That sharply reduces the number of people who can't be bothered to look for work. That part is good.
The bleeding-heart objection to the no-welfare argument is that it puts the people for whom there are no jobs in the same position, except they've already done everything they could to find a job and their choices are beg, steal or starve.
So the no-welfare policy also sharply increases the number of good people whose choices are beg, steal or starve. That part is not good.
We've seen what happens without direct aid: no matter what "should" happen, no matter that good Christian people are commanded to care for the poor, what actually happens is huge numbers of good people are reduced to begging, theft and starvation. That includes disproportionate numbers of the very old and the very young.
Some things nobody can make any money at are worth doing anyway. It used to be a matter of pride that we could support teachers and care for our sick and our poor and deliver the mail no matter what. Things like those were intended to run at financial break-even at best, with the benefits regarded as diffuse, intangible and long-term. They were regarded as not just badges of pride, but as investments in our country. They were provisions for the general welfare of the United States.
Go check the status of the United States economy, the personal wealth and health and education, the poverty rate—the American standard of living—back when the top marginal tax rate was 90% and the government budgets were balanced. We'll wait.
What happened to the U.S. economy had nothing to do with those policies. We started using more oil than we produce—and btw ANWR could supply 2% at best of our consumption, one sheet of paper in a paperback book, for not very long— and the oil exporters started charging market rates. The economies of socialist Europe and Japan recovered from WWII. They're socialists, and they out-compete us, at least if we measure by standard of living, or health, or education, or longevity, or happiness. Why is that? It isn't welfare: they have that. It isn't unions: they have those. It isn't universal healthcare: they have that.
I'm paying my ISP to provide Internet service. If they unilaterally convert to a video streaming service for specific companies and deliver my traffic with whatever's left over, but still charge me full rate, I can think of no more contemptuous insult than to call that "unsurprising".
Apple as a company recognized many things about how computers should work long before any other company. They unfortunately didn't just make computers that did all those things, they acted like what they knew that made them special was all there was to know.
Considering that much of what they did know directly undercut the business model of a huge swath of computer and technical-media people, who made their living by learning endless quirks from e.g. manuals others couldn't or wouldn't read, this earned them the deep tribal enmity of every single one of those people.
Considering that what they didn't know included things like the importance of dealing directly with asynchrony rather than attempting to pave over it, or at best treating it as an unwanted child, the fact that they could still make their OS do the job in the '90s, while a testament to the hard work of their crew, was a source of bemused wonder to those who understood.
And of course displaying any attitude excites the posers.
Small wonder they were in trouble, then. Apple's only fans were those who could see the value in what Apple was doing, didn't have a vested interest in seeing it fail, and rejected the scorn of some techies either from not knowing or from faith that Apple would get around to fixing it. By the time OS 8 was out, that faith was beginning to ebb.
It's too much to ask of IE, though if they did a good job it would reset the bar for awesome, but won't the other major browsers just break down and host an embedded emacs?
Apple's pulling down 2x the handset profits of all its competitors combined this year, and the article uses the word "shocking",... but not for that stat. They use the word "shocking" for this one:
And now consider the next shocking chart. Apple will generate 2X as much handset profit as the rest of the industry combined this year DESPITE SELLING ONLY 3% OF THE HANDSETS BY UNIT VOLUME:
Oh, I see. It's the Gooooooold standard that did it.
Ike's observations on the plainly foreseeable consequences of militarization wouldn't have anything to do with it, would they? No, of course not. All that labor and talent and material spent producing jack shit, worse than nothing, in the final sense theft from and murder of humanity, had nothing at all to do with leaving less actual wealth for the people of this nation. No.
And the avaricetocrats' bankrupting the government didn't have anything to do with it either. Nor the abandonment of just about every major government regulation enacted in the face of unbridled corruption over the past hundred fifty years, with the near-immediate consequent explosion of arrant theft.
Nope. The Goooooold standard would have stopped all that.
If only we had less money, our stupidity in handling it wouldn't hurt nearly so much.
Look. The Brits had a real aristocracy for centuries, a cultured ruling class with a centuries of experience and an ironbound sense of obligation to their nation. Nothing said they had to mint every pound of sterling, and they didn't. A well-managed economy hums along very nicely, and so long as there's enough numismatic metal available to cover the value supply the treasury can work: it just coins enough money to cover the expanding economy.
Which works great so long as there's enough gold and silver and whathaveyou to do it with.
And which also works great when you get a retard who wants to finance wars with handwaving and rhetoric, because he can't.
But it specifically does not work great when the economy is producing value and there isn't enough coin to cover it. It specifically sucks ass when there isn't enough coin to cover the expanding economy.
That isn't what happened to the Brits, though. What happened to the Brits was us. The sun literally never set on the British Empire, but these absolutely insane colonists who turned their own ideals against them and said the King had no right to govern anyone who could govern themselves better and wanted to just would not shut up and then they went and saved the world in honor of those ideals%1. You can't be an honest colonialist, see that, and continue as before without feeling a bit... small.
Fact is, the Greek-British-American ideal is true. The Gettysburg Address remains one of the greatest achievements of the human race, capable of bringing goose pimples and tears to anyone with enough brainpower to follow the rhetoric, and "that all men are created equal" is still self-evident, no matter what the blinkered, small-souled literalists whose reach wouldn't exceed a gnat's grasp try to make of it.
That's what happened to the British. They reached the rightful end of their national endeavor, faced the question "what do we do now?", and found no answer. That riddle has been waiting for every empire since the dawn of time, and none of them has found an answer yet%2.
But I'll tell you what the answer isn't. The answer is not to find some simple rule, harp endlessly on its good consequences in some circumstances while mulishly ignoring the worse ones that show up when the world has outgrown it, and demand that everyone on the planet shut their brains off and retreat a hundred or two years.
===
%1 : yes, I know: LeMay firebombed Dresden. Truman bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the same effect but a lot less equipment. Turing cracked Enigma and British determination in the face of assault was second only to the Russians... and what the Russians did at Stalingrad simply beggars description. Still: what other nation has ever been attacked from the west and immediately declared war in both directions? Successfully?
%2 : You could make an argument that the Brits had it but didn't recognize it. That answer would be "and now for something completely different".
Tying fiscal policy to the amount of shiny stuff we can dig out of the ground is far sillier.
If the amount is fixed, then as the economy expands the available value per coin increases and prices drop: instant, guaranteed deflation, getting worse as the rate of value growth increases. If you want to sell something new into a stable economy, everyone else has to drop their prices to make room for you.
Fiat currency may require us to appoint agents to keep the money supply and the value supply roughly in sync, but at least it provides the mechanism to do it. With the ooooh-pritty-shiny-stuff system, so appealing to people who can't think when there's pritty shiny stuff in sight, money and value are absolutely guaranteed to get out of sync, badly. very fast, with no remedy at all. Unless of course the economy is totally stagnant, with no new wealth being created. Yeah, that's what we want.
By what measure? Nobody outdoes Bach at what he did. Nobody outdoes Zeppelin at what they did. Nobody can replace Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday, Frederic Chopin, Cole Porter, Jimi Hendrix, Wolfgang Mozart, Bob Dylan, Glenn Miller, Buddy Holly, Antonio Vivaldi. Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Robert Johnson, John Lennon. You and I and anyone else could make this list five times as long, spreading it across the centuries and sticking just to composers just as easily.
Big Media's curious premise is that endless generations of marketers have some right to orthodontics and Caribbean vacations because Pink Floyd recorded Have A Cigar.
Take a look at the discounts supermarkets offer you to use their card. Notice that they don't tie it to how often you use it, there aren't any rewards for using it a lot, no loyalty points, nothing. Just use the card, get hefty price breaks and deals.
They're letting real money, lots of it, walk out the door, and they're getting nothing but data in return.
These guys aren't using the PC clock crystal, and they're improving on NTP by a large margin.
Plus they split interval and wall-clock timers for people who really care that their interval measurements don't get screwed with by leap second (or DST) resets and such, and the accuracy of those measurements is down in the ns range.
Okay, for "taxpayer" substitute "everybody who does buy insurance", i.e. everybody who's unwilling to gamble with other people's money.
Neither I nor many others want to gamble with other people's money
Then you either have insurance and are whining about nothing at all or you have several million dollars on tap and are whining about pocket change.
Without insurance, if you get hit with cancer or a bad accident you're all but certain to be unable to afford to pay the bill yourself, which means other people pay or we let you die. Which means you're gambling with other people's money. And whining about it, and tossing out red herrings by the bucketload.
You want to pay out of pocket for the small stuff? Then get catastrophic coverage and pay out of pocket for the small stuff, same as me. Congratulations! You got what you want and have complied with the law.
unemployed, a student, and not having insurance after I was hit in an accident
...
All together my medical bills came to more than $120,000, without any guarantee the docs, hospital, rehab house, and therapists would ever be paid.
...
Around $180,000 is covered by patient insurance, the remaining $2.22 million/day is funded by charitable contributions."
...
Seriously? Those stories are supposed to show how not having insurance isn't gambling with other people's money?
a requirement that I MUST buy health insurance, or be punished (fined $950)
So buy insurance. If you don't, nobody's going to just let you die because civilized countries, decent humans, don't do that. If you get sick and can't afford the hospital stay that would make you healthy again, then somebody's going to pay for it anyway -- that somebody being the taxpayer. So we don't care if you're young and healthy and say you don't need it when the truth is you'd rather gamble with our money, and we don't really lend much credence to accusations of immorality from anyone who suggests we would or should just watch someone's child die right here in our own country.
Slashdot Mirror
studied ignorance of history and reality
It's not new.
[North Vietnamese diplomat:] Mr. McNamara, you must never have read a history book. If you had, you'd know we weren't pawns of the Chinese and the Russians... Don't you understand that we've been fighting the Chinese for a thousand years?
What, then, do you propose as the cure for raw tribalism? Limiting government power merely puts the tribal in command of unfettered tribes called "corporations", who like all tribes eliminate the competition and somehow rarely stop the predation: they start hurting the people paying them, their supposed customers. Establishing religions substitutes "churches". Republics and democracies at least diffuse tribes, if they're given any actual power. What other organization has a prayer of not devolving into a tribe?
Almost all of northwestern Europe is socialist. Please point out the tyrannies for us.
That "from each...to each" maxim has older roots than you think, and probably very much closer to home.
I take it that there's no objection to spending tax money to provide for the general welfare of the United States, then? Let's pick full-on individual and family welfare payments to discuss—what people get when their unemployment insurance has run out and they still can't find a job.
Option 1: no welfare payments. Those who can find a job eat. Those who can't, beg, starve or steal.
Option 2: welfare payments. Those who can't find a job still eat. Nobody has to beg, starve or steal.
A third option would be reviving the WPA, which seems to draw even more vociferous objections from those who object to welfare.
For the people who can't be bothered to find a job, the no-welfare argument is: if they steal for food, toss them in prison even though that's far more expensive. If they don't steal or beg, let them starve.
That sharply reduces the number of people who can't be bothered to look for work. That part is good.
The bleeding-heart objection to the no-welfare argument is that it puts the people for whom there are no jobs in the same position, except they've already done everything they could to find a job and their choices are beg, steal or starve.
So the no-welfare policy also sharply increases the number of good people whose choices are beg, steal or starve. That part is not good.
We've seen what happens without direct aid: no matter what "should" happen, no matter that good Christian people are commanded to care for the poor, what actually happens is huge numbers of good people are reduced to begging, theft and starvation. That includes disproportionate numbers of the very old and the very young.
Some things nobody can make any money at are worth doing anyway. It used to be a matter of pride that we could support teachers and care for our sick and our poor and deliver the mail no matter what. Things like those were intended to run at financial break-even at best, with the benefits regarded as diffuse, intangible and long-term. They were regarded as not just badges of pride, but as investments in our country. They were provisions for the general welfare of the United States.
Go check the status of the United States economy, the personal wealth and health and education, the poverty rate—the American standard of living—back when the top marginal tax rate was 90% and the government budgets were balanced. We'll wait.
What happened to the U.S. economy had nothing to do with those policies. We started using more oil than we produce—and btw ANWR could supply 2% at best of our consumption, one sheet of paper in a paperback book, for not very long— and the oil exporters started charging market rates. The economies of socialist Europe and Japan recovered from WWII. They're socialists, and they out-compete us, at least if we measure by standard of living, or health, or education, or longevity, or happiness. Why is that? It isn't welfare: they have that. It isn't unions: they have those. It isn't universal healthcare: they have that.
He calls it "marketable" and says "applications can work around that pretty easily".
I'm paying my ISP to provide Internet service. If they unilaterally convert to a video streaming service for specific companies and deliver my traffic with whatever's left over, but still charge me full rate, I can think of no more contemptuous insult than to call that "unsurprising".
They are saying nothing of hurting those that don't pay
Of course they are saying nothing of that.
Imagine if Hulu and Netflix pay for better QOS
My ISP becomes a Hulu and Netflix Service Provider that graciously allows internet traffic to use the leftovers.
Apple as a company recognized many things about how computers should work long before any other company. They unfortunately didn't just make computers that did all those things, they acted like what they knew that made them special was all there was to know.
Considering that much of what they did know directly undercut the business model of a huge swath of computer and technical-media people, who made their living by learning endless quirks from e.g. manuals others couldn't or wouldn't read, this earned them the deep tribal enmity of every single one of those people.
Considering that what they didn't know included things like the importance of dealing directly with asynchrony rather than attempting to pave over it, or at best treating it as an unwanted child, the fact that they could still make their OS do the job in the '90s, while a testament to the hard work of their crew, was a source of bemused wonder to those who understood.
And of course displaying any attitude excites the posers.
Small wonder they were in trouble, then. Apple's only fans were those who could see the value in what Apple was doing, didn't have a vested interest in seeing it fail, and rejected the scorn of some techies either from not knowing or from faith that Apple would get around to fixing it. By the time OS 8 was out, that faith was beginning to ebb.
a .deb is just an ar archive. Poke around, it won't take all day to figure out what's going on in there.
It's too much to ask of IE, though if they did a good job it would reset the bar for awesome, but won't the other major browsers just break down and host an embedded emacs?
You don't think it's possible they fired him because he was antenna-man, and they were out there giving his answers about the antennas?
Apple's pulling down 2x the handset profits of all its competitors combined this year, and the article uses the word "shocking", ... but not for that stat. They use the word "shocking" for this one:
And now consider the next shocking chart. Apple will generate 2X as much handset profit as the rest of the industry combined this year DESPITE SELLING ONLY 3% OF THE HANDSETS BY UNIT VOLUME:
Skip the alphabet soup. Do you really have no one on staff capable of recognizing competence?
If you don't, who were you planning to have manage the new hires? Who were you planning to have interpret your metrics?
any concept or system breaks at one scale or other
I spent a whole lot of words trying to say that.
Oh, I see. It's the Gooooooold standard that did it.
Ike's observations on the plainly foreseeable consequences of militarization wouldn't have anything to do with it, would they? No, of course not. All that labor and talent and material spent producing jack shit, worse than nothing, in the final sense theft from and murder of humanity, had nothing at all to do with leaving less actual wealth for the people of this nation. No.
And the avaricetocrats' bankrupting the government didn't have anything to do with it either. Nor the abandonment of just about every major government regulation enacted in the face of unbridled corruption over the past hundred fifty years, with the near-immediate consequent explosion of arrant theft.
Nope. The Goooooold standard would have stopped all that.
If only we had less money, our stupidity in handling it wouldn't hurt nearly so much.
Look. The Brits had a real aristocracy for centuries, a cultured ruling class with a centuries of experience and an ironbound sense of obligation to their nation. Nothing said they had to mint every pound of sterling, and they didn't. A well-managed economy hums along very nicely, and so long as there's enough numismatic metal available to cover the value supply the treasury can work: it just coins enough money to cover the expanding economy.
Which works great so long as there's enough gold and silver and whathaveyou to do it with.
And which also works great when you get a retard who wants to finance wars with handwaving and rhetoric, because he can't.
But it specifically does not work great when the economy is producing value and there isn't enough coin to cover it. It specifically sucks ass when there isn't enough coin to cover the expanding economy.
That isn't what happened to the Brits, though. What happened to the Brits was us. The sun literally never set on the British Empire, but these absolutely insane colonists who turned their own ideals against them and said the King had no right to govern anyone who could govern themselves better and wanted to just would not shut up and then they went and saved the world in honor of those ideals%1. You can't be an honest colonialist, see that, and continue as before without feeling a bit ... small.
Fact is, the Greek-British-American ideal is true. The Gettysburg Address remains one of the greatest achievements of the human race, capable of bringing goose pimples and tears to anyone with enough brainpower to follow the rhetoric, and "that all men are created equal" is still self-evident, no matter what the blinkered, small-souled literalists whose reach wouldn't exceed a gnat's grasp try to make of it.
That's what happened to the British. They reached the rightful end of their national endeavor, faced the question "what do we do now?", and found no answer. That riddle has been waiting for every empire since the dawn of time, and none of them has found an answer yet%2.
But I'll tell you what the answer isn't. The answer is not to find some simple rule, harp endlessly on its good consequences in some circumstances while mulishly ignoring the worse ones that show up when the world has outgrown it, and demand that everyone on the planet shut their brains off and retreat a hundred or two years.
===
%1 : yes, I know: LeMay firebombed Dresden. Truman bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the same effect but a lot less equipment. Turing cracked Enigma and British determination in the face of assault was second only to the Russians ... and what the Russians did at Stalingrad simply beggars description. Still: what other nation has ever been attacked from the west and immediately declared war in both directions? Successfully?
%2 : You could make an argument that the Brits had it but didn't recognize it. That answer would be "and now for something completely different".
Tying fiscal policy to the amount of shiny stuff we can dig out of the ground is far sillier.
If the amount is fixed, then as the economy expands the available value per coin increases and prices drop: instant, guaranteed deflation, getting worse as the rate of value growth increases. If you want to sell something new into a stable economy, everyone else has to drop their prices to make room for you.
Fiat currency may require us to appoint agents to keep the money supply and the value supply roughly in sync, but at least it provides the mechanism to do it. With the ooooh-pritty-shiny-stuff system, so appealing to people who can't think when there's pritty shiny stuff in sight, money and value are absolutely guaranteed to get out of sync, badly. very fast, with no remedy at all. Unless of course the economy is totally stagnant, with no new wealth being created. Yeah, that's what we want.
A glut of the old stuff devalues the new stuff,
No, it doesn't. Bach doesn't devalue Zeppelin.
especially when the old stuff is better
By what measure? Nobody outdoes Bach at what he did. Nobody outdoes Zeppelin at what they did. Nobody can replace Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday, Frederic Chopin, Cole Porter, Jimi Hendrix, Wolfgang Mozart, Bob Dylan, Glenn Miller, Buddy Holly, Antonio Vivaldi. Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Robert Johnson, John Lennon. You and I and anyone else could make this list five times as long, spreading it across the centuries and sticking just to composers just as easily.
Big Media's curious premise is that endless generations of marketers have some right to orthodontics and Caribbean vacations because Pink Floyd recorded Have A Cigar.
Say what? You really think that's an IT idea?
Take a look at the discounts supermarkets offer you to use their card. Notice that they don't tie it to how often you use it, there aren't any rewards for using it a lot, no loyalty points, nothing. Just use the card, get hefty price breaks and deals.
They're letting real money, lots of it, walk out the door, and they're getting nothing but data in return.
These guys aren't using the PC clock crystal, and they're improving on NTP by a large margin.
Plus they split interval and wall-clock timers for people who really care that their interval measurements don't get screwed with by leap second (or DST) resets and such, and the accuracy of those measurements is down in the ns range.
I wonder if this would surprise him: at 4AM Pacific today, I searched for "knuth announcement".
Google told me that was the 27th most common search over the preceding hour.
LR parsing, TeX, METAFONT not good enough chops to satisfy you, eh? You must be pretty hot stuff to be unimpressed by that.
As for taocp being an "aggregat[ion] of algorithms" ... well ... it's hard to know what to say. I think you kind of missed the point of it.
It's not a desk reference.
It teaches you what a computer is, how to think about what's going on in there.
what MSFT has done in the past
So now breaking contracts as part of a business strategy is no predictor of how they'll behave?
Okay, for "taxpayer" substitute "everybody who does buy insurance", i.e. everybody who's unwilling to gamble with other people's money.
Neither I nor many others want to gamble with other people's money
Then you either have insurance and are whining about nothing at all or you have several million dollars on tap and are whining about pocket change.
Without insurance, if you get hit with cancer or a bad accident you're all but certain to be unable to afford to pay the bill yourself, which means other people pay or we let you die. Which means you're gambling with other people's money. And whining about it, and tossing out red herrings by the bucketload.
You want to pay out of pocket for the small stuff? Then get catastrophic coverage and pay out of pocket for the small stuff, same as me. Congratulations! You got what you want and have complied with the law.
unemployed, a student, and not having insurance after I was hit in an accident
...
All together my medical bills came to more than $120,000, without any guarantee the docs, hospital, rehab house, and therapists would ever be paid.
Around $180,000 is covered by patient insurance, the remaining $2.22 million/day is funded by charitable contributions."
...
Seriously? Those stories are supposed to show how not having insurance isn't gambling with other people's money?
And somebody modded that _up_?
That's just ... sad.
a requirement that I MUST buy health insurance, or be punished (fined $950)
So buy insurance. If you don't, nobody's going to just let you die because civilized countries, decent humans, don't do that. If you get sick and can't afford the hospital stay that would make you healthy again, then somebody's going to pay for it anyway -- that somebody being the taxpayer. So we don't care if you're young and healthy and say you don't need it when the truth is you'd rather gamble with our money, and we don't really lend much credence to accusations of immorality from anyone who suggests we would or should just watch someone's child die right here in our own country.