The unwillingness to enforce border controls has probably cost more Americans jobs in the last 20 years than any technological advance
Well, that and the ridiculous tax policies and regulatory cost that have driven US manufacturing to Mexico, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and finally China.
I would love to build my electronic products in the US. But I can't do that (and remain competitive) because even if the labor here were FREE, I can't even buy the components here in the US at anywhere near the price I'd pay in China! And yes, that holds true for components made by US companies. The entire world's electronics industry is now built around China, and changing that will require real changes to tax and regulatory burdens. It's do-able, but none of the politicos want it to happen...
That said, there are enough benefits to manufacturing here that some companies are finally beginning to move back to the US: Witness the new Moto X cellphone, which is only possible because it's built here in the US. You can't deliver a custom product in days when your supply chain involves moving shipping containers from China on filthy burners of bunker oil...
Actually, many of those jobs were during an oil boom, can you say "sheer luck".
No, Perry (and many others, the credit's not all his) deliberately helped *create* that "oil boom". (More of a "gas boom" really, but hey...) This stuff isn't accidental. It's not luck. To believe that it is is to buy into the following fallacy so famously pointed out by Heinlein:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
— Robert Heinlein
Perry, like most Texans, believes we make our own luck, mostly by not strangling gold-laying geese in the first place.
Look, sometimes Perry's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but there's a very good reason he's stayed in office for nearly 13 years: Innovation and wealth creation matters. "Oil booms" don't just happen, especially in this environment. In fact, this one happened in spite of the best efforts of many in government to choke it to death.
BTW - If we could eliminate the roadblocks to fracking technology that's proven quite safe for half a century, we could make the entire US energy independent in a decade - creating many millions of high-paying jobs in the process. (The greenies should love this, since it would free up the Saudi 's clean light crude to replace China's coal addiction, which is adding a new coal-fired power plant every week, with no modern emissions controls. Natural gas is very nearly as clean as Hydrogen (and in fact is the only industrially and commercially viable source of Hydrogen in the first place!))
My background is robotics and factory automation, and I've done lots of business process automation over the years, too. Actually, the general trend I've observed over nearly the past three decades is that:
1) Automation creates roughly as many jobs as it eliminates in a direct sense, and undoubtedly creates *more* then it eliminates when you consider indirect jobs at vendors, manufacturers, support firms, etc. This still makes business sense because the increase in production capacity, flexibility, and/or quality more than offsets the overall increased cost.
2) The new jobs are higher-paying, not lower-paying, on average. This is true even in manufacturing. Note though, that some of these jobs will shift from the actual manufacturer outside to other vendors and suppliers. This may eventually begin to change as we build more and more reliable systems that require less configuration, management, and maintenance, but it really hasn't changed all that much in recent decades, and there's little reason to expect that all of a sudden, we're going to start building perfectly reliable turn-key solutions to every problem. That's not very likely to happen in the career span of anyone reading this in 2013...
3) The big difference is that those new jobs require more technical knowledge and training than the old ones did. The days when you could get paid (well, with a rich pension and benefits!) for repeatedly turning a bolt a half-turn to the right all day are dead everywhere but in the most hidebound union shops like the former "Big 3" US automakers. Higher knowledge requirements mean higher value and higher pay. I've *never* seen an automation project that eliminated substantially more jobs than it created. The nature of those jobs can and does change, but progress and advancing technology is generally a good thing for employment, especially for those willing to change along with it. Good companies will go out of their way to train their line folks in running new systems, since they understand the work and the desired end product better than anyone. This requires good labor relations, though, and I've seen more than a few unions (and a handful of companies, to be fair) intentionally screw up such a transition out of spite.
By the way, the changing of those jobs and their requirements for training is called "progress", and it's what makes better, safer, higher-paying jobs more widely available to the society at large.
Your argument sounds suspiciously like an argument for a full-employment program for people like the elevator operators that push buttons for Senators and Congressmen in the US Capitol! Only our bloated Washington government can be that stupid and craven...
I've been involved in several startups (two successful, two failed, one meh) over the past 14 years, and I can tell you one thing for sure - not ONE of them would have gotten off the ground if the company had had to pay for healthcare. In that entire time, I've had health coverage for only about 3 years. I don't have it now, and under the current circumstances, I'm *really* glad I don't have to buy it yet...
It's really the lack of a good catastrophic-coverage-only option that inhibits startups - big company or small, I don't *want* copays for ordinary doctors visits and really expensive coverage for a crapload of things I'll never use ("mental health", "substance abuse", "behavioral disorders", etc.). The only things I care about are coverage for really big catastrophic health issues (cancer, heart attacks, and the like), and as a result, I'm perfectly OK with a high deductible for those.
It's laughable to say that the lack of health coverage deters the entrepreneurial spirit - if that were true, then Silicon Valley, Texas, and other tech hubs would have a lot more competition from the socialist paradise economies of Europe, right? Instead, the opposite is true.
And why the hell is my healthcare tied to my job in any way in the first place? Only because of meddlesome federal government policies dating back to FDR! My other insurance isn't tied to my job - free my health insurance and let the market work there like it DOES WORK for all other kinds of insurance. (And yes, I want health *insurance* against disaster, not healthcare *benefits* - the real problem with Obamacare and the reason it must eventually fail is that it eliminates any way for actuarial risk to be accounted for!
This is a good reason *why* embryonic stem cell research is rightfully vilified. This isn't treading into ethically murky waters, it's heading out to sea in a supercharged Cigarette.
This is simply monstrous - in the most literal possible meaning of the word. I'm a tough enough guy, but I've only felt physically ill or repulsed as I did when reading TFAs a few other times, one of those was reading summaries of the Kermit Gosling trial. This is in some ways even worse, because there isn't even a grisly profit motive in play - it's just a flatly staggering disregard for humanity and ethical norms in the name of "science"...
I quit caring (much) about upgradeability and repairability years ago. By the time I need repairs or upgrades, Moore's law has made them folly. I'm there now - I could upgrade my laptop decently for a few hundred, but for about the same price, I can buy a brand new one that's *much* better (capability, modern I/O, lower power/longer battery life, etc.)
Unless you're a heavy duty gamer or video editor, you don't need more than a mid-range CPU or GPU, anyway - it's better to put the money into more RAM and a big, fast SSD - you'll see far more speed gain for the dollar.
This doesn't just apply to computers - I'm weighing buying a new color laser printer because that's actually a little cheaper (even with full duplex) than refreshing drums and fusers in my old one, even though it's lightly used and this is the first time they've been changed. Economically, it makes sense, but it really rubs me the wrong way to toss out a nearly perfectly good printer that could run for many more years. (It's an Oki, and they're flat bulletproof - if I wait for it to actually break, I'll have it forever...)
Noticed at the grocery store the other day that they've finally stopped selling even the small glass jars of mayonnaise, so there's no option but buy plastic or make your own (not all that hard, but a PITA.) In the last few years, it's become nearly impossible to buy most foods in glass or even non-plastic-lined metal containers.
Putting so much of our food into intimate contact with plastics, and the rise of increased aluminum exposure from antiperspirants (a generation or two ago, deodorants outsold antiperspirants) are two of the bigger changes that can be identified from before the obesity epidemic. (The article also ignores RF exposure, either of the body, or our food (via microwaves). Granted, there's no real evidence that most such exposure is harmful, but when I was a kid, there were only a few fat kids, and everyone knew who they were. Our parents and grandparents were almost all quite lean. Today, it's the skinny kids that stand out. That means we should be looking at everything that's different - as TFA points out, this obesity epidemic is likely a compound effect.)
Many xenoestrogens (xenobesigens?) such as BPA and pthalates are particularly easily dissolved in fats and oils, so plastic containers for things like mayo, yogurt, butter, and the like (and plastic film wrapping all our meat) seem like an especially bad idea...
(BTW, note that the Pulitzer Center stats are per 100K *people*, NOT per 100K vehicle miles, which is the usual standard benchmark for traffic safety statistics! This is a very odd choice for such statistics, and throws the entire effort into considerable question....)
Passing a written driving test means exactly zip, zero, and nada as an indication of ability top operate a car safely.
Ditch the written test entirely, as it's really just a measure of bureaucratic obeisance. Instead, replace it with a *real* behind the wheel test: De-emphasize things like parallel parking (although that should be required - if you can't master your car at low speed, you have no business trying it at velocity), and require things like demonstrating safely getting back into the traffic lane after running off on a sharply banked gravel shoulder at 70 MPH.
Four things are needed: 1) Better driver testing like that described above, 2) requiring large trucks to *always* remain in a designated lane on highways unless actually passing, 3) setting highway speed limits at no less than the 85th percentile of free-flowing traffic speeds, and 4) eliminating all alcohol laws other than a felony with mandatory 1 year jail time for driving over 0.12% BAL. (Yes, the BAL threshold needs to be that high - high enough to prevent/discourage "chickenshit" DWI checks that apply to everyone except, apparently, our serially drunk-driving District Attorneys here in Austin (two in the past few months!)
These changes would make the US among the very safest places to drive, while encouraging maximal freedom to travel safely and quickly.
I just completed a quick round trip out to west Texas, and I firmly believe that higher speed limits have dramatically *increased* the safety of these wide-open highways. There's really no reason at all why the speed limit on some of the wide, clear roads out there shouldn't be 90 or 100 MPH - a fair fraction of the traffic is quite safely traveling that fast every day, anyway...
I'm old enough to have seen this done in moving a running program from one machine to another. The computers involved were old (even then) DEC PDPs (I don't remember whether they were 8s or 11s), and the program was running on a 8KB (IIRC) magnetic core memory card - literally, a thousands of little tiny magnetic toruses strung on what seemed like billions of hairlike laquered wires.
It went like this: 1 - Program running on computer one 2 - Halt computer one (stop program counter), pull out memory card, carry across building to other computer. (The bits are magnetic, big, and need no power to persist for ages - if you wanted to store the running program on a shelf for a while here, that would have worked, too) 3 - Replace core memory card from computer 2 with the one from computer 1 4 - Resume program counter, and running program continues exactly where it left off in left computer 1! (Much faster resume than Windows or even OSX!)
You'll note that the parties were not nearly so strong and influential until the 17th amendment destroyed the proper role of the Senate as the house of Congress representing the interests of the States. The House of Representatives was the house of Congress representing the People, hence equal numbers of Senators for each state, but population-weighted numbers of Representatives.)
The 17th Amendment (direct election of Senators) has effectively eliminated the voice of the States themselves in the federal government. Replacing that voice with another popularity contest led to the rise of two all-powerful parties and the unchecked growth of government power, to the point that we now sit on the brink of outright tyranny that would have made the most dreaded rulers in history jealous.
BTW, as a Texan, it kinda seems unfair that my friends in Vermont, with a total state population smaller than El Paso alone, get the same two senators we get for one of the world's largest and most dynamic economies...;-)
Note that Michelle Catalano herself did not say this was JTTF or FBI. That was apparently asserted by The Guardian or The Atlantic writing about the incident. Michelle's own writeup simply refers to men with guns and badges, and does not specify who they were with. (BTW, Michelle Catalano is a moderately prominent blogger and writer whose writings certainly remove her from the likely terrorist suspects, if any of these badge-carrying morons had bothered to actually Google anything for themselves before showing up to harass free citizens.)
This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do.
All I know is if I’m going to buy a pressure cooker in the near future, I’m not doing it online.
All of a sudden, Glenn Beck's ranting about the Cloward-Piven-Ayers "collapse the system" strategy doesn't sound so far-fetched. We know now that we have far more to fear from our own government than we do from any terrorist group, even the bloodthirsty suicidal Islamic ones. (FWIW, no Islamic terrorist has ever tried to humiliate me by groping my junk as painfully as possible, but the TSA has. It's time to face the fact that the entire Dept of Homeland Defense was an insanely bad idea and disband it back into its constituent agencies, at pre-9/11 staffing levels. Hell, DHS couldn't even stop the Boston bombing after the Russians *told* us these guys were bombtastic Muslims, so why on earth should we accept any loss of freedom at all to these totalitarian goons?)
I think the fact that people are demonstrably afraid of associating with and supporting tea-party organizations (to a degree that quite possibly changed the outcome of last year's election) pretty much proves the point. After all, who really wants to put themselves directly on the targeted-for-abuse list of the IRS, which will soon wield unaccountable and unappealable powers that the Gestapo would have killed for (literally)?
No, you probably can't win it, but what's right is right.
Using phrase "begs the question" to mean "raises the question", instead of it's proper meaning of "assumes that which is to be proved" just makes you look like a dolt, or the average rationality-imparied excretion of the US public school system. (Hey, I'm one too, I know: It's taken me decades to overcome my Austin public school education...)
And while the RT was a failure before the Snowden leaks, most of us knew you were giving it all up to governments around the world. Only the uninformed felt safe using your products. And now? Everyone knows. As alternatives present themselves, people are increasingly interested in them. People didn't want Linux, but they're REALLY interested in Android.
Oh, come on, like Google is any more trustworthy? The Heil Hope cabal "owns" all the key IT companies, now. (Scott McNealy was right after all, when he said, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.")
This is proof positive that you COULD HAVE created a Linux based product of your own a very long time ago. Why didn't you?
Oooh! Magic Android-flavored Linux pixie dust! That fixes *everything*! Sorry to break it to you, but stirring Linux into the mix doesn't do that... (I like Linux for servers, but it's a disaster as a desktop user OS - Android is pointed to as a "success" of Linux, but Android is only successful because it *doesn't* look or act like Linux! (Well, that and the fact that it's really, really cheap. Wonder why? Couldn't be Google's ambitions, could it? Even so, the Android market is so balkanized that users of one Android device can't figure out how to use another...)
I bought a Surface RT when they first came out, and kept it for the maximum two weeks before almost reluctantly, returning it to the local Microsoft Store. The following is an unbiased an account as I can provide - I really have no dog in this fight, and to be honest, I'm pretty thoroughly disgusted with the current state of the art in tablets, phones, and computers, anyway. We're no where near where we should be in the second decade of the 21st century...
The Surface RT is maddening: On one hand, it is definitely the best and smoothest responding tablet that's not built by Apple, and it has a pretty darn decent set of MS productivity apps (and yes, these matter - A LOT).
On the other hand, in one of the most bone-headed design moves ever, MS decided that since Apple gets away with only supporting AirPrint printers, they could get by with only supporting a set of very new and mostly expensive new printers in RT. This was the final straw that made me return my RT - I have a very nice, expensive, but older color laser printer - I shouldn't have to buy a new printer to use with a damn tablet! MS could have bitten the bullet and twisted printer vendors' arms to rebuild all WHQL printer drivers for RT. Instead, they decided it was OK to make everyone buy a new printer. There is NO WAY TO ADD printer drivers to RT, so this couldn't even be fixed! I wonder how many enterprise/corporate sales that cost them...
Surface needs some of the fixes that Win8 needs in general (remove the seams between Metro and desktop - it's really two OSes sewed together as a hideous monster, now), but Win8 clearly works best on a tablet, and I actually liked 8 on the RT. (Enough that I upgraded my laptop, where Win8 was such a disaster that I got a refund and reinstalled Win7, a 2-day investment to fall back!)
Here's a formula for Surface Success, to whom it may concern at Microsoft (I'm open to a new job, if you want someone to make this happen...):
1) Do a Haswell Surface Pro, so the battery life doesn't suck. Make it the same size and weight as the existing Surface RT (No excuses, do it, dammit! (NEDID)). Keep the digitizer pen - it's a killer feature and differentiator that your competitors don't have. (But make sure it looks like a Cintiq to Windows apps!) Seriously consider adding a 15-16" version with the same retina-scale pixel density. There is a screaming need for a big-screen tablet, especially if it could run all regular Win apps. Include Office to square the feature set with the RT (NEDID). Price should be far more aggressive, and this is doable, although margins will be thinner at first. Remember you're fighting for mind and market share here - and more importantly the continued relevance of Windows itself - if you fail here, you're done in a few years, anyway...
2) New Surface RT hardware as thin and light as the iPad you'll be facing in another couple of months. Consider going to a "squarer" (less mail-slot-like) screen aspect ratio, so it can be held and used as a reader in one hand - this doesn't work today. (Applies to Pro, too). Use a modern cutting edge multicore ARM chip to get current again. Ditch the current display and use the one from the current Surface Pro - 1366x768 is laughable in today's market, and not nearly enough vertical pixels to really be usable with the office suite, which is your greatest differentiator. Make it work with *all* WHQL-certified printer drivers, unless the mfr. is just dead. Make sharing and syncing *anything* with another Win8 machine trivial and near magic. (Big bonus points for near-seamless integration with iOS and Android devices, too.). Up the local storage, SkyDrive doesn't cut it.
3) Include the touch cover, for crying out loud. A $30 upgrade option to swap for the keycaps version is OK. Who wants any Surface without one of these?
4) Make the magnetic charging connector work as well as the one for the key cover. Don't know why this was screwed up in the first place, but it's distressingly possible to hear the pow
Android may indeed be Linux under the covers (although that fact is becoming less and less relevant even to Linux-heads with each successive version of Android), but Android has succeeded because of one thing: to the user, it looks and works *nothing* like most Linux distros. Android looks and works like a second-rate copy of iOS, which is pretty much what it is, with DalvikVM goofiness thrown in for good measure...
(No, I'm not an Apple fanboy - the only Apple I own is an iPhone. But I also just bought a new cutting edge Android tablet (the highly reviewed Hisense Sero 7 Pro), and I can tell you that Android is still not even close to in the same league as far as usability and responsiveness. I didn't appreciate how iOS apps almost never hang or stutter until I lived with the current Android state of the art for a while.
Last Fall, I actually bought a Win 8 upgrade and applied it to my HP laptop. I tried to like it and make it work - I really did. But Win 8 on a non-touchscreen device is just a trainwreck (I actually like it quite a bit on the Surface tablets, and my daughter's quite happy with her new Asus touchscreen laptop).
My Win8 experience was so horrible that I actually got my money back from Microsoft (which they happily return within 30 days, BTW), and spent the next 2-3 days putting Win 7 back again. Unless there's some reason you really like Metro, there's no reason to upgrade from 7 and a whole lot of reasons not to. If you're a power user of any stripe, you just want Metro to go away and never darken your screen again. The core of Win 8 is still good (it's essentially Win 7), but the interface bits are really rough - trial and error to figure out which of the two very different (and completely separate) control panels a given setting resides in is only one example of the continual frustration.
I dual booted on the old Win 7 install, but gave it up because I got *really* tired of various Linux installs and upgrades (even big-name ones) eventually scrogging my bootloader so that Windows no longer worked - Now *there's* some nice, friendly behavior to totally screw up naive users, especially since there hasn't even been a good, easy way to put the MBR back straight since MS removed "FDISK/MBR" from XP. Seriously, fixing this correctly is so far beyond the capabilities of most computer users (and even quite a few Linux users) that any machine with a bad MBR is effectively "bricked" for most users. (And is there a more user-hostile program on the planet than GRUB? Seriously, LILO was also a cryptic mess, but at least it worked, and was simple enough to sort out in 15 minutes of doc-reading. GRUB is just another FSF trainwreck imposed to appease Stallman's ego...)
It's reasonable to say, though, that Linux and Unix don't work worth a flip on anything approaching most modern, current laptop hardware. You have to be willing to surf a wave a couple of years behind the big lead wave on the laptop hardware front if you're going to insist on NIX/NUX...
This is very dependent on the type of laser printer you have. All laser toners are not created equal!
A few years ago, I needed a good way to make my own outdoor labels gat would still be readable after 5-10 years outdoors, possibly in the sun. (The right way to do this is with professionally made polycarbonate enapsulated labels, but those are best for high volumes - we needed low volumes and the ability to do very small lot sizes.)
The answer was a quality "weatherproof laser label" (polyester, with a good outdoor adhesive) and the *RIGHT* kind of laser printer. After quite a bit of research, I found that the polymer toners used by Oki's LED page printers were the most durable I could find - they actually melt into the paper fibers, rather than just partially melting on top.
In my experience in the real world, Oki's toners are dramatically more durable than those from HP, Samsung, and Brother. In general, the "shinier" the toner, the more durable, but you also need to make sure the printer really bonds the toner strongly to the paper,name Oki's printers excel at that, too. (Yeah, I realize I sound like an Oki printer fanboy, but only because they've earned it...)
Although the colored toners will fade in 3-5 years of exposure to the Texas sun (but are legible for up to 5 years, blue goes first), the black used for the barcodes (code128) appears to be set to last as long as the label itself. I've got some with over a decade outdoors that still read just fine, although the edges of the label look kinda ratty.
If there is more durable print output from an "ordinary" printer, I don't know what it is. With black toner and a really good label, the Oki is at least as durable as a purpose-built Zebra label printer, and produces great results on regular paper, too.
How does that make sense. Sure SSD is very similar to RAM physically, but it is still like a thousand times shower, is it not?
Yep, that's why folks like John Ousterhout (originator of tcl) are now workgng on things like RAMcloud - to get the lightning speed of RAM scaled to big data sizes. Commodity 10/100G Ethernet will make this idea *really* interesting...
I would imagine most jobs paying $200K are in areas where $200K does't go as far as it would in other places. It is somewhat arbitrary to look at a dollar figure without looking at what it will cost you to live within a reasonable distance of said job.
I'm always amazed at how frequently even supposedly smart people can't see beyond the dollar signs on the paycheck to factor in the true cost (and benefit) of living in a place. But ehn I suppose I'm not the first - Mark Twain couldn't fathom it, either, and obviously had trouble with people who couldn't be convinced that income is only relative to buying power.
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The unwillingness to enforce border controls has probably cost more Americans jobs in the last 20 years than any technological advance
Well, that and the ridiculous tax policies and regulatory cost that have driven US manufacturing to Mexico, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and finally China.
I would love to build my electronic products in the US. But I can't do that (and remain competitive) because even if the labor here were FREE, I can't even buy the components here in the US at anywhere near the price I'd pay in China! And yes, that holds true for components made by US companies. The entire world's electronics industry is now built around China, and changing that will require real changes to tax and regulatory burdens. It's do-able, but none of the politicos want it to happen...
That said, there are enough benefits to manufacturing here that some companies are finally beginning to move back to the US: Witness the new Moto X cellphone, which is only possible because it's built here in the US. You can't deliver a custom product in days when your supply chain involves moving shipping containers from China on filthy burners of bunker oil...
Actually, many of those jobs were during an oil boom, can you say "sheer luck".
No, Perry (and many others, the credit's not all his) deliberately helped *create* that "oil boom". (More of a "gas boom" really, but hey...) This stuff isn't accidental. It's not luck. To believe that it is is to buy into the following fallacy so famously pointed out by Heinlein:
Perry, like most Texans, believes we make our own luck, mostly by not strangling gold-laying geese in the first place.
Look, sometimes Perry's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but there's a very good reason he's stayed in office for nearly 13 years: Innovation and wealth creation matters. "Oil booms" don't just happen, especially in this environment. In fact, this one happened in spite of the best efforts of many in government to choke it to death.
BTW - If we could eliminate the roadblocks to fracking technology that's proven quite safe for half a century, we could make the entire US energy independent in a decade - creating many millions of high-paying jobs in the process. (The greenies should love this, since it would free up the Saudi 's clean light crude to replace China's coal addiction, which is adding a new coal-fired power plant every week, with no modern emissions controls. Natural gas is very nearly as clean as Hydrogen (and in fact is the only industrially and commercially viable source of Hydrogen in the first place!))
My background is robotics and factory automation, and I've done lots of business process automation over the years, too. Actually, the general trend I've observed over nearly the past three decades is that:
1) Automation creates roughly as many jobs as it eliminates in a direct sense, and undoubtedly creates *more* then it eliminates when you consider indirect jobs at vendors, manufacturers, support firms, etc. This still makes business sense because the increase in production capacity, flexibility, and/or quality more than offsets the overall increased cost.
2) The new jobs are higher-paying, not lower-paying, on average. This is true even in manufacturing. Note though, that some of these jobs will shift from the actual manufacturer outside to other vendors and suppliers. This may eventually begin to change as we build more and more reliable systems that require less configuration, management, and maintenance, but it really hasn't changed all that much in recent decades, and there's little reason to expect that all of a sudden, we're going to start building perfectly reliable turn-key solutions to every problem. That's not very likely to happen in the career span of anyone reading this in 2013...
3) The big difference is that those new jobs require more technical knowledge and training than the old ones did. The days when you could get paid (well, with a rich pension and benefits!) for repeatedly turning a bolt a half-turn to the right all day are dead everywhere but in the most hidebound union shops like the former "Big 3" US automakers. Higher knowledge requirements mean higher value and higher pay. I've *never* seen an automation project that eliminated substantially more jobs than it created. The nature of those jobs can and does change, but progress and advancing technology is generally a good thing for employment, especially for those willing to change along with it. Good companies will go out of their way to train their line folks in running new systems, since they understand the work and the desired end product better than anyone. This requires good labor relations, though, and I've seen more than a few unions (and a handful of companies, to be fair) intentionally screw up such a transition out of spite.
By the way, the changing of those jobs and their requirements for training is called "progress", and it's what makes better, safer, higher-paying jobs more widely available to the society at large.
Your argument sounds suspiciously like an argument for a full-employment program for people like the elevator operators that push buttons for Senators and Congressmen in the US Capitol! Only our bloated Washington government can be that stupid and craven...
I've been involved in several startups (two successful, two failed, one meh) over the past 14 years, and I can tell you one thing for sure - not ONE of them would have gotten off the ground if the company had had to pay for healthcare. In that entire time, I've had health coverage for only about 3 years. I don't have it now, and under the current circumstances, I'm *really* glad I don't have to buy it yet...
It's really the lack of a good catastrophic-coverage-only option that inhibits startups - big company or small, I don't *want* copays for ordinary doctors visits and really expensive coverage for a crapload of things I'll never use ("mental health", "substance abuse", "behavioral disorders", etc.). The only things I care about are coverage for really big catastrophic health issues (cancer, heart attacks, and the like), and as a result, I'm perfectly OK with a high deductible for those.
It's laughable to say that the lack of health coverage deters the entrepreneurial spirit - if that were true, then Silicon Valley, Texas, and other tech hubs would have a lot more competition from the socialist paradise economies of Europe, right? Instead, the opposite is true.
And why the hell is my healthcare tied to my job in any way in the first place? Only because of meddlesome federal government policies dating back to FDR! My other insurance isn't tied to my job - free my health insurance and let the market work there like it DOES WORK for all other kinds of insurance. (And yes, I want health *insurance* against disaster, not healthcare *benefits* - the real problem with Obamacare and the reason it must eventually fail is that it eliminates any way for actuarial risk to be accounted for!
No, that was just a 117-blade razor. You hang it on the wall and walk down the hall to the kitchen, where you find your 117-slice toaster waiting...
F00F! (As distinct from FOOF, dioxygen diflouride which is even more entertaining (at least from a distance...)
what is it actually good for?
You can use it to build a boat.
...or a broach, or a pterodactyl... or a flying saucer...
This is a good reason *why* embryonic stem cell research is rightfully vilified. This isn't treading into ethically murky waters, it's heading out to sea in a supercharged Cigarette.
This is simply monstrous - in the most literal possible meaning of the word. I'm a tough enough guy, but I've only felt physically ill or repulsed as I did when reading TFAs a few other times, one of those was reading summaries of the Kermit Gosling trial. This is in some ways even worse, because there isn't even a grisly profit motive in play - it's just a flatly staggering disregard for humanity and ethical norms in the name of "science"...
I quit caring (much) about upgradeability and repairability years ago. By the time I need repairs or upgrades, Moore's law has made them folly. I'm there now - I could upgrade my laptop decently for a few hundred, but for about the same price, I can buy a brand new one that's *much* better (capability, modern I/O, lower power/longer battery life, etc.)
Unless you're a heavy duty gamer or video editor, you don't need more than a mid-range CPU or GPU, anyway - it's better to put the money into more RAM and a big, fast SSD - you'll see far more speed gain for the dollar.
This doesn't just apply to computers - I'm weighing buying a new color laser printer because that's actually a little cheaper (even with full duplex) than refreshing drums and fusers in my old one, even though it's lightly used and this is the first time they've been changed. Economically, it makes sense, but it really rubs me the wrong way to toss out a nearly perfectly good printer that could run for many more years. (It's an Oki, and they're flat bulletproof - if I wait for it to actually break, I'll have it forever...)
Noticed at the grocery store the other day that they've finally stopped selling even the small glass jars of mayonnaise, so there's no option but buy plastic or make your own (not all that hard, but a PITA.) In the last few years, it's become nearly impossible to buy most foods in glass or even non-plastic-lined metal containers.
Putting so much of our food into intimate contact with plastics, and the rise of increased aluminum exposure from antiperspirants (a generation or two ago, deodorants outsold antiperspirants) are two of the bigger changes that can be identified from before the obesity epidemic. (The article also ignores RF exposure, either of the body, or our food (via microwaves). Granted, there's no real evidence that most such exposure is harmful, but when I was a kid, there were only a few fat kids, and everyone knew who they were. Our parents and grandparents were almost all quite lean. Today, it's the skinny kids that stand out. That means we should be looking at everything that's different - as TFA points out, this obesity epidemic is likely a compound effect.)
Many xenoestrogens (xenobesigens?) such as BPA and pthalates are particularly easily dissolved in fats and oils, so plastic containers for things like mayo, yogurt, butter, and the like (and plastic film wrapping all our meat) seem like an especially bad idea...
ROFL - Wish I had mod points and hadn't already posted in this thread...
(BTW, note that the Pulitzer Center stats are per 100K *people*, NOT per 100K vehicle miles, which is the usual standard benchmark for traffic safety statistics! This is a very odd choice for such statistics, and throws the entire effort into considerable question....)
Passing a written driving test means exactly zip, zero, and nada as an indication of ability top operate a car safely.
Ditch the written test entirely, as it's really just a measure of bureaucratic obeisance. Instead, replace it with a *real* behind the wheel test: De-emphasize things like parallel parking (although that should be required - if you can't master your car at low speed, you have no business trying it at velocity), and require things like demonstrating safely getting back into the traffic lane after running off on a sharply banked gravel shoulder at 70 MPH.
Four things are needed: 1) Better driver testing like that described above, 2) requiring large trucks to *always* remain in a designated lane on highways unless actually passing, 3) setting highway speed limits at no less than the 85th percentile of free-flowing traffic speeds, and 4) eliminating all alcohol laws other than a felony with mandatory 1 year jail time for driving over 0.12% BAL. (Yes, the BAL threshold needs to be that high - high enough to prevent/discourage "chickenshit" DWI checks that apply to everyone except, apparently, our serially drunk-driving District Attorneys here in Austin (two in the past few months!)
These changes would make the US among the very safest places to drive, while encouraging maximal freedom to travel safely and quickly.
I just completed a quick round trip out to west Texas, and I firmly believe that higher speed limits have dramatically *increased* the safety of these wide-open highways. There's really no reason at all why the speed limit on some of the wide, clear roads out there shouldn't be 90 or 100 MPH - a fair fraction of the traffic is quite safely traveling that fast every day, anyway...
I'm old enough to have seen this done in moving a running program from one machine to another. The computers involved were old (even then) DEC PDPs (I don't remember whether they were 8s or 11s), and the program was running on a 8KB (IIRC) magnetic core memory card - literally, a thousands of little tiny magnetic toruses strung on what seemed like billions of hairlike laquered wires.
It went like this:
1 - Program running on computer one
2 - Halt computer one (stop program counter), pull out memory card, carry across building to other computer. (The bits are magnetic, big, and need no power to persist for ages - if you wanted to store the running program on a shelf for a while here, that would have worked, too)
3 - Replace core memory card from computer 2 with the one from computer 1
4 - Resume program counter, and running program continues exactly where it left off in left computer 1! (Much faster resume than Windows or even OSX!)
You'll note that the parties were not nearly so strong and influential until the 17th amendment destroyed the proper role of the Senate as the house of Congress representing the interests of the States. The House of Representatives was the house of Congress representing the People, hence equal numbers of Senators for each state, but population-weighted numbers of Representatives.)
The 17th Amendment (direct election of Senators) has effectively eliminated the voice of the States themselves in the federal government. Replacing that voice with another popularity contest led to the rise of two all-powerful parties and the unchecked growth of government power, to the point that we now sit on the brink of outright tyranny that would have made the most dreaded rulers in history jealous.
BTW, as a Texan, it kinda seems unfair that my friends in Vermont, with a total state population smaller than El Paso alone, get the same two senators we get for one of the world's largest and most dynamic economies... ;-)
Note that Michelle Catalano herself did not say this was JTTF or FBI. That was apparently asserted by The Guardian or The Atlantic writing about the incident. Michelle's own writeup simply refers to men with guns and badges, and does not specify who they were with. (BTW, Michelle Catalano is a moderately prominent blogger and writer whose writings certainly remove her from the likely terrorist suspects, if any of these badge-carrying morons had bothered to actually Google anything for themselves before showing up to harass free citizens.)
Here is what Michelle herself had to say about the incident, the most chilling part is at the end:
All of a sudden, Glenn Beck's ranting about the Cloward-Piven-Ayers "collapse the system" strategy doesn't sound so far-fetched. We know now that we have far more to fear from our own government than we do from any terrorist group, even the bloodthirsty suicidal Islamic ones. (FWIW, no Islamic terrorist has ever tried to humiliate me by groping my junk as painfully as possible, but the TSA has. It's time to face the fact that the entire Dept of Homeland Defense was an insanely bad idea and disband it back into its constituent agencies, at pre-9/11 staffing levels. Hell, DHS couldn't even stop the Boston bombing after the Russians *told* us these guys were bombtastic Muslims, so why on earth should we accept any loss of freedom at all to these totalitarian goons?)
I think the fact that people are demonstrably afraid of associating with and supporting tea-party organizations (to a degree that quite possibly changed the outcome of last year's election) pretty much proves the point. After all, who really wants to put themselves directly on the targeted-for-abuse list of the IRS, which will soon wield unaccountable and unappealable powers that the Gestapo would have killed for (literally)?
No, you probably can't win it, but what's right is right.
Using phrase "begs the question" to mean "raises the question", instead of it's proper meaning of "assumes that which is to be proved" just makes you look like a dolt, or the average rationality-imparied excretion of the US public school system. (Hey, I'm one too, I know: It's taken me decades to overcome my Austin public school education...)
And while the RT was a failure before the Snowden leaks, most of us knew you were giving it all up to governments around the world. Only the uninformed felt safe using your products. And now? Everyone knows. As alternatives present themselves, people are increasingly interested in them. People didn't want Linux, but they're REALLY interested in Android.
Oh, come on, like Google is any more trustworthy? The Heil Hope cabal "owns" all the key IT companies, now. (Scott McNealy was right after all, when he said, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.")
This is proof positive that you COULD HAVE created a Linux based product of your own a very long time ago. Why didn't you?
Oooh! Magic Android-flavored Linux pixie dust! That fixes *everything*! Sorry to break it to you, but stirring Linux into the mix doesn't do that... (I like Linux for servers, but it's a disaster as a desktop user OS - Android is pointed to as a "success" of Linux, but Android is only successful because it *doesn't* look or act like Linux! (Well, that and the fact that it's really, really cheap. Wonder why? Couldn't be Google's ambitions, could it? Even so, the Android market is so balkanized that users of one Android device can't figure out how to use another...)
I bought a Surface RT when they first came out, and kept it for the maximum two weeks before almost reluctantly, returning it to the local Microsoft Store. The following is an unbiased an account as I can provide - I really have no dog in this fight, and to be honest, I'm pretty thoroughly disgusted with the current state of the art in tablets, phones, and computers, anyway. We're no where near where we should be in the second decade of the 21st century...
The Surface RT is maddening: On one hand, it is definitely the best and smoothest responding tablet that's not built by Apple, and it has a pretty darn decent set of MS productivity apps (and yes, these matter - A LOT).
On the other hand, in one of the most bone-headed design moves ever, MS decided that since Apple gets away with only supporting AirPrint printers, they could get by with only supporting a set of very new and mostly expensive new printers in RT. This was the final straw that made me return my RT - I have a very nice, expensive, but older color laser printer - I shouldn't have to buy a new printer to use with a damn tablet! MS could have bitten the bullet and twisted printer vendors' arms to rebuild all WHQL printer drivers for RT. Instead, they decided it was OK to make everyone buy a new printer. There is NO WAY TO ADD printer drivers to RT, so this couldn't even be fixed! I wonder how many enterprise/corporate sales that cost them...
Surface needs some of the fixes that Win8 needs in general (remove the seams between Metro and desktop - it's really two OSes sewed together as a hideous monster, now), but Win8 clearly works best on a tablet, and I actually liked 8 on the RT. (Enough that I upgraded my laptop, where Win8 was such a disaster that I got a refund and reinstalled Win7, a 2-day investment to fall back!)
Here's a formula for Surface Success, to whom it may concern at Microsoft (I'm open to a new job, if you want someone to make this happen...):
1) Do a Haswell Surface Pro, so the battery life doesn't suck. Make it the same size and weight as the existing Surface RT (No excuses, do it, dammit! (NEDID)). Keep the digitizer pen - it's a killer feature and differentiator that your competitors don't have. (But make sure it looks like a Cintiq to Windows apps!) Seriously consider adding a 15-16" version with the same retina-scale pixel density. There is a screaming need for a big-screen tablet, especially if it could run all regular Win apps. Include Office to square the feature set with the RT (NEDID). Price should be far more aggressive, and this is doable, although margins will be thinner at first. Remember you're fighting for mind and market share here - and more importantly the continued relevance of Windows itself - if you fail here, you're done in a few years, anyway...
2) New Surface RT hardware as thin and light as the iPad you'll be facing in another couple of months. Consider going to a "squarer" (less mail-slot-like) screen aspect ratio, so it can be held and used as a reader in one hand - this doesn't work today. (Applies to Pro, too). Use a modern cutting edge multicore ARM chip to get current again. Ditch the current display and use the one from the current Surface Pro - 1366x768 is laughable in today's market, and not nearly enough vertical pixels to really be usable with the office suite, which is your greatest differentiator. Make it work with *all* WHQL-certified printer drivers, unless the mfr. is just dead. Make sharing and syncing *anything* with another Win8 machine trivial and near magic. (Big bonus points for near-seamless integration with iOS and Android devices, too.). Up the local storage, SkyDrive doesn't cut it.
3) Include the touch cover, for crying out loud. A $30 upgrade option to swap for the keycaps version is OK. Who wants any Surface without one of these?
4) Make the magnetic charging connector work as well as the one for the key cover. Don't know why this was screwed up in the first place, but it's distressingly possible to hear the pow
Android may indeed be Linux under the covers (although that fact is becoming less and less relevant even to Linux-heads with each successive version of Android), but Android has succeeded because of one thing: to the user, it looks and works *nothing* like most Linux distros. Android looks and works like a second-rate copy of iOS, which is pretty much what it is, with DalvikVM goofiness thrown in for good measure...
(No, I'm not an Apple fanboy - the only Apple I own is an iPhone. But I also just bought a new cutting edge Android tablet (the highly reviewed Hisense Sero 7 Pro), and I can tell you that Android is still not even close to in the same league as far as usability and responsiveness. I didn't appreciate how iOS apps almost never hang or stutter until I lived with the current Android state of the art for a while.
Last Fall, I actually bought a Win 8 upgrade and applied it to my HP laptop. I tried to like it and make it work - I really did. But Win 8 on a non-touchscreen device is just a trainwreck (I actually like it quite a bit on the Surface tablets, and my daughter's quite happy with her new Asus touchscreen laptop).
My Win8 experience was so horrible that I actually got my money back from Microsoft (which they happily return within 30 days, BTW), and spent the next 2-3 days putting Win 7 back again. Unless there's some reason you really like Metro, there's no reason to upgrade from 7 and a whole lot of reasons not to. If you're a power user of any stripe, you just want Metro to go away and never darken your screen again. The core of Win 8 is still good (it's essentially Win 7), but the interface bits are really rough - trial and error to figure out which of the two very different (and completely separate) control panels a given setting resides in is only one example of the continual frustration.
I dual booted on the old Win 7 install, but gave it up because I got *really* tired of various Linux installs and upgrades (even big-name ones) eventually scrogging my bootloader so that Windows no longer worked - Now *there's* some nice, friendly behavior to totally screw up naive users, especially since there hasn't even been a good, easy way to put the MBR back straight since MS removed "FDISK /MBR" from XP. Seriously, fixing this correctly is so far beyond the capabilities of most computer users (and even quite a few Linux users) that any machine with a bad MBR is effectively "bricked" for most users. (And is there a more user-hostile program on the planet than GRUB? Seriously, LILO was also a cryptic mess, but at least it worked, and was simple enough to sort out in 15 minutes of doc-reading. GRUB is just another FSF trainwreck imposed to appease Stallman's ego...)
It's reasonable to say, though, that Linux and Unix don't work worth a flip on anything approaching most modern, current laptop hardware. You have to be willing to surf a wave a couple of years behind the big lead wave on the laptop hardware front if you're going to insist on NIX/NUX...
This is very dependent on the type of laser printer you have. All laser toners are not created equal!
A few years ago, I needed a good way to make my own outdoor labels gat would still be readable after 5-10 years outdoors, possibly in the sun. (The right way to do this is with professionally made polycarbonate enapsulated labels, but those are best for high volumes - we needed low volumes and the ability to do very small lot sizes.)
The answer was a quality "weatherproof laser label" (polyester, with a good outdoor adhesive) and the *RIGHT* kind of laser printer. After quite a bit of research, I found that the polymer toners used by Oki's LED page printers were the most durable I could find - they actually melt into the paper fibers, rather than just partially melting on top.
In my experience in the real world, Oki's toners are dramatically more durable than those from HP, Samsung, and Brother. In general, the "shinier" the toner, the more durable, but you also need to make sure the printer really bonds the toner strongly to the paper,name Oki's printers excel at that, too. (Yeah, I realize I sound like an Oki printer fanboy, but only because they've earned it...)
Although the colored toners will fade in 3-5 years of exposure to the Texas sun (but are legible for up to 5 years, blue goes first), the black used for the barcodes (code128) appears to be set to last as long as the label itself. I've got some with over a decade outdoors that still read just fine, although the edges of the label look kinda ratty.
If there is more durable print output from an "ordinary" printer, I don't know what it is. With black toner and a really good label, the Oki is at least as durable as a purpose-built Zebra label printer, and produces great results on regular paper, too.
How does that make sense. Sure SSD is very similar to RAM physically, but it is still like a thousand times shower, is it not?
Yep, that's why folks like John Ousterhout (originator of tcl) are now workgng on things like RAMcloud - to get the lightning speed of RAM scaled to big data sizes. Commodity 10/100G Ethernet will make this idea *really* interesting...
I would imagine most jobs paying $200K are in areas where $200K does't go as far as it would in other places. It is somewhat arbitrary to look at a dollar figure without looking at what it will cost you to live within a reasonable distance of said job.
I'm always amazed at how frequently even supposedly smart people can't see beyond the dollar signs on the paycheck to factor in the true cost (and benefit) of living in a place. But ehn I suppose I'm not the first - Mark Twain couldn't fathom it, either, and obviously had trouble with people who couldn't be convinced that income is only relative to buying power.