I don't think the "Don't be evil" business was a PR sham. It may have been hubris though.
Page and Brin were CS PhD students when they came up with the idea for PageRank. Google may be the first company that was built around algorithms. And when they decided they needed a CEO with business background, they chose Schmidt, who was one of the co-authors of lex, the Unix lexical analyzer.
I think people at Google thought they were exceptional, that they were smart enough to succeed without the ethical compromises most people feel they have to make in order to get a shot at the brass ring. There may be something to this as a marketing identity. Google depends on being trusted by its users more than most companies would be.
The problem with "Don't be Evil" is that it's an impossible standard if you take it to mean never make a mistake. In the real world, things (such as street view) are seldom purely good, people differ on what is "good", and well-intentioned people make mistakes.
China was a case in point. Different philosophical models of ethics suggest different views of trying to play within the Chinese government rules. Google's choice was apparently based on a consequentialist projection of the impact of their actions. The reasoning goes that the people in China aren't going to get access to a censorship-free search engine no matter what Google decides. Therefore Google's action wouldn't result in any novel harm to its users, and Google would have a position from which to push for greater liberalization. So from a utilitarian viewpoint, Google's participation in China's censorship was at worst morally neutral, and possibly slightly positive.
From a deontological standpoint, however, Google's participation in Chinese censorship is reprehensible, because it is actively participating in stripping its users of their human rights. Whether or not the regime *needs* Google to accomplish this is irrelevant.
This is not such an easy kind of conflict to resolve. Most of us who aren't professional philosophers tend to use a little of each style of ethics because neither style of ethics consistently yields answers that seem right to us.
"Be worthy of trust" might be a better motto for Google, because it captures the essential about the ethics of Google's relationship to its customers without opening up cans of worms like whose definition of "evil" to use.
Never in my life has engineering been seen as a glamorous profession, or a road to riches. Back in the early 80s when I was in school, if you told someone you were an engineer at best you'd get a little respect for being able to do something not everyone could. But you didn't get the kind of personal interest you' get if you said you were pre-med. Even if you were *pre-law*, people assumed you might be headed for great things, maybe even fabulous wealth and prestige, although that was highly unlikely. If you were an engineering student, people would assume that you were headed for a comfortable, middle-class suburban lifestyle with well above median income, but nothing like riches.
And that assumption was not only accurate, it was good for engineering as a profession.
Engineering was something you did because you had an affinity for it. You weren't persuaded to take it up, you must needed to know the effort you put into learning it would be repaid with a career. Now there's a lot more effort put into teaching elementary student about what engineering is like, which is a good thing, but no effort like that will ever do as much as the prospect of a steady career with plenty of good jobs.
Up until the 70s it was common to spend one's entire career in a single company, or perhaps no more than three or four. Now it's as common to change careers as it was once to change jobs.
Until the end of the Cold War, the engineering job market (and physics job market as well) was supported by projects undertaken for national prestige. After the Cold War, we looked for a "peace dividend" -- in other words we wanted to cash out of our investments in our national future. Free trade was part of that. The ideology of free trade is anti-nationalistic. The global system works better, produces more wealth, when trade barriers are removed. But if you are a country that had amassed as much wealth as the US, there was nothing that you could do that couldn't be done more cheaply elsewhere.
That includes innovation.
Innovation is a type of labor that can be purchased like any other kind of labor. So really there is at present no more reason for America to be a center of innovation than there is for America to be a center of manufacturing. There is no reason for young Americans to train themselves in disciplines that won't offer them careers.
The only reason to intervene in this natural course of events is nationalistic, the desire to make Americans as a people better paid than their counterparts elsewhere.
I believe in significant anthropogenic contributions to climate change, but I am far from certain we can turn back the clock. We ought to take the notion that the world is heading towards a new climate equilibrium no matter what we do as a serious possibility.
That doesn't mean we should give up on greenhouse emissions because there's a big difference between getting there in,say fifty years vs eighty or a hundred.
This is not the kind of thing we can know with the kind of certainty we'd like. Somebody with serious intellectual ability needs to look at all the reasonably likely scenarios and their probabilities and develop a rational framework (not just picking your preferred scenario ) for taking them all into account when making policy, whether that is simply maximizing expected economic growth, some kind of mini-max strategy or maybe (in the case of runaway warming ) some way to compensate people who didn't benefit from greenhouse emissions but pay the costs.
Re:Cold hard facts about resource usage?
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Xfce 4.8 Released
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· Score: 1
Sorry, but it turns out that all the facts about XFCE's resource usage are warm and squishy, and a lot of folks prefer it that way.
I agree with you so far as you go, but there is one factor in the cost effectiveness equation you haven't considered: effectiveness.
The effectiveness of either the manual system or the high tech system are limited by the fact that people who want to cross the border illegally will inevitably find ways of getting into the country that are outside the specifications of either system. The difference is you can disband the guard posts every hundred yards when you find out that it doesn't work. With the high tech system you have a very expensive white elephant on your hands. Worst of all is the political need to justify the sunk costs, because you're never seeing that money again. That means we'd have ended up dumping more money into the failed system until there's a change of administration or even the stink is so bad even supporters of the system have to distance themselves from it.
If you're going to keep dumping money into a system trying to change it, go with a manual one if you can. You can adapt a labor based system by moving the labor into other places doing completely different kinds tasks. The guys manning the guard towers can be shifted to inspecting the produce trucks. With the high tech system you've got to issue an RFP for what amounts to *another* expensive system to extend its capabilities.
I'm not saying that an automated, high tech system isn't something we'd want to do eventually, but spending eight billion on a system to do something that's (a) we have not yet demonstrated we know how to do and (b) has intelligent opponents who can shift strategy and tactics -- that sounds like a recipe for waste to me. Play a few serious game theoretic rounds with the opponents, and when you think you've reached some kind of strategic equilibrium then dump money into a high tech system.
Bingo. Know your customer. *REALLY* know your customer.
That means more than knowing what kind of stuff he says is cool. That's easy because most people say the same things without thinking very much. But that doesn't cut it because most customers will do at least some thinking before they pull out the checkbook. You've got to know what will shift him from thinking about all the reasons for *not* buying product into thinking of all the reasons *to* buy it, without killing you later with support costs.
Don't leaves this to sales guys taking the customer out for a beer. You need somebody with a longer term perspective than the next sale really studying the customer, preferably in his natural habitat. What will *his* customers pay him or punish him for? Who does he have to justify himself to? What is his workplace like? What products and technology are there? What are his employees like?
I did this for many years... seat of the pants marketing. I'm not particularly proud of my ignorance of formal marketing techniques, but gosh I knew the people using our product, in some ways better than they usually did themselves.
One time a manager told me his field guys would never use our product. They hated anything new. He even predicted they'd take the equipment and run it over with their trucks. So I said, "watch this." I walked into the briefing room, stood up in front of all those beefy, foul-mouthed working class guys and said, "When you start using this thing you can stop filling out your end-of-day paperwork. Just put it in the charging stand, punch out, and go home." Case closed. I didn't patronize these guys because they didn't have a college degree. I spoke to something they cared about.
Sure. The problem is that multiple proven, highly effective ways of losing customers are so closely related to quick and cheesy ways of adding new features. I'll name a few:
* Adding bugs. * Adding complexity. * Overloading support. * Slowing maintenance. * Making just about everything more expensive, including features customers will decide they need in the future.
I could go on and on, but this is enough to show that going on a new feature spree isn't a no-brainer.
Now from a marketing perspective, who does this better than anyone else? Apple. For many years Apple earned the sneers of tech heads everywhere by keeping its products on a strict feature budget. They *never* introduce a product that does everything you could easily imagine it doing. Instead they:
(a) do a really nice job on the features they deliver and
(b) regularly release a *small* number of new features, small enough they can really hit the marketing ball out of the park when they explain to customers why they absolutely *have* to chuck their old iPod and buy a new one.
The second point is really the key. Apple doesn't get ahead of themselves, they never do it all in one go. Sometimes the new features are really quite impressive, other times they're things Apple could easily have done earlier, but they've timed to nudge the herd down the upgrade track.
The first gen Touch didn't have a built in speaker. That's not a deal breaker, because the first gen was so cool. Then Apple introduced the second gen, which really was only a tiny bit spiffier, but it *did* have a speaker. Then every time a happy 1st gen owner could have used that feature, he'd be thinking, "Gee I love my 1st gen, but I'd be just a *little* bit happier if I bought a 2nd gen." This leaves *everyone* happy. The owner now has his spiffy new iPod with speaker, and Apple has sold two nearly identical devices to a customer for much less than twice the cost.
The only people who are unhappy are cranks who insist on believing Apple does features this way because it's too stupid to come up with new features or see their value to the customer. It's *because* they see the value of new features that they dole them out this way, so they get the greatest possible mileage out of them.
Step back for a second and look at what's happening.
On one hand, the companies giving up their seed corn aren't being forced to literally at gun point. They're deciding that at this moment, they're better living another day and starving tomorrow. So in a sense it's a win-win scenario.
On the other hand, the enterprise benefiting from this exploits government backing to take a longer term view of the transaction than the companies developing the technology can afford. So in a different it's not a win/win scenario; it's a win/minimize-your-losses proposition.
So China wins here not by being more ingenious or creating new knowledge or technology, but by exploiting its ability to control the rules of the game. If you twist your vision enough, I suppose that what it is doing in this case might look like innovation.
China is a nation with tremendous human resources and ingenuity, but it *also* exploits the fact that it is the only major economic power on earth still pursuing a kind of mercantilist trade policy.
Now what's really interesting is that an act of purported terrorism (the burning of the Reichstag building) convinced the Reichstag to give Hitler temporary "emergency" powers.
We already have a lot of people who've bought into the idea that in "war" (defined as just about any kind of national security problem) the President's Constitutional powers are just about unconditional. Those people are nearly all Republicans -- I don't want to paint *all* Republicans with this brush, but there is an extreme wing of the party that believes this. Palin is part of that wing.
I don't think Palin beating Obama is likely, once people see them head to head in debate, even if Palin plays the expectations game. But I don't think her beating Obama is entire implausible given the right conditions.
Well, that's not *exactly* like the Pentagon Papers. In the case of the Pentagon Papers, the executive branch was hiding the fact that it exceeded its constitutional authority. That motivation matters.
That doesn't mean that Wikileaks was unjustified here, only that assigning persons or groups to analogous roles isn't enough. The specific motives the government has to keep something secret and the public interest in having that piece of information revealed are what matters.
I have no way of knowing the criteria Wikileaks used to release the cables to outside organizations, but unless they can guarantee responsible handling of the data by the recipient, sending data to a third party for screening does *not* automatically let them off the hook. Of course, if they have identified a potentially important issue that needs to be revealed, running that by a relatively trustworthy third party would be a very responsible way of doing it.
Specifics matter. One of the most important here is that Wikileaks has no particular duty not to embarrass the United States or even undermine some of its foreign policy initiatives (e.g. on climate change treaties). So in the case of things like arm twisting on Copenhagen, there's a reasonable justification for them to reveal the data. In other cases the data released seems unreasonable to me, specifically revealing foreign infrastructure which the US is strategically dependent upon. That's something I'd look at very, very carefully before passing on, because even if I hate the US, I can't overlook the possibility I'm inviting trouble for people working at those installations.
Overall, most of the stuff that came out is just embarrassing. That's neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned. We'll survive, and Wikileaks doesn't have any duty not to embarrass us.
I could make a case for recording government officials 24/7.
Sure, you *could* make a case, but it wouldn't be a *reasonable* case. I like a good reductio ad absurdum too, but you can't live under rules constructed solely around extreme cases. "Reasonableness" is the secret sauce that makes living under *any* system of rules tolerable, because *no* system of rules covers every contingency.
You use "reasonableness" this way. You ask yourself, would a reasonable person accept a deal under the proposed rules? Not a paranoid person; not a saint; nor a radical. An ordinary, well informed person, applying sensible standards. If a reasonable person wouldn't accept 24/7 surveillance as the price of a government job, that tells you one of two possible things about people who *would* accept the job. Either (1) they do not make decisions in ways that would seem to you to be reasonable, or (2) they have no intention of playing by the rules.
The "reasonableness" criteria means you don't just sweep things into simplistic categories (in my opinion). You examine the circumstances. True, the diplomatic cables in the Wikileaks case are government documents the government doesn't want you to see, just like the Pentagon Papers. That doesn't mean that releasing the cables is automatically equally reasonable to releasing the Pentagon Papers, because they are different *kinds* of documents from different situations. You have to make the case for each release individually.
If you like reductio, here's one. Suppose that a US embassy internal report says that a particular dissident is planning to get his family out of some country before the regime takes reprisals against them for his speaking his mind. Like the Pentagon Papers, this is a government document that our government doesn't want you to read. The circumstances are different, because the government's reason for keeping this secret is different. In this case, as soon as the knowledge about the dissident becomes public that regime *will* attack that dissident's family. In the case of the Pentagon Papers, the executive branch wanted to conceal the fact that the President had exceeded his constitutional authority.
I have no love for a lot of the "American Left" as most would think of it, nor for the "Right". But this is just fucking stupid.
I've lived long enough that I've gone from the right side of the political spectrum to the left side without moving one damned inch. One thing I've never been able stomach is weasely claim that both sides are just the same. That's the argument people make when they want to stop paying attention.
We aren't talking about whether to join the "left" social club or the "right".We're talking about an issue of public policy -- whether vendors of network services should be allowed to control consumers' access to information. Now there is a kind of equivalence here, I suppose, in that both sides have some good points to make. But that doesn't mean that the positions are equivalent.
I wrote him off during the Clinton administration when he went on a rant about the looks of Chelsea Clinton. Now, Bill and Hillary were fair game, but at the time Chelsea who was something like twelve at the time, didn't ask for any of that. When he was called on that, he said he was an entertainer, not a journalist. That tells you everything you need to know about the man. He's a bully and coward isn't man enough to apologize for a cheap shot at a little girl.
You make it sound like working incrementally is some kind of clever stratagem by the left. Let me tell you, the small number of people on the left in the US are not at all for incrementalism. For example, they don't want health insurance reform, or even health insurance reform with a public option. The left hates the "public option" just as much as the right. What they want is single payer.
What confuses people is that the left has no media clout. Sure, there's Michael Moore, but the right gets more out of him as a whipping boy than the left does in terms of seeing its policies enacted.
The "leftist incrementalism" you are talking about is really just centrist pragmatism. The centrists want health insurance form, are open to single payer as a feature of that, but aren't going to go to the mat for it. Centrists are the furthest right that is visible in this country, except on a few narrow Internet based forums. Nancy Pelosi is the media's idea of a hard core left winger? The left hates her as much if not *more* than the right does. They just do it in private because they don't have a platform.
Because a thinking person prefers his idealized heroes fictional. As for his non-fictional heroes, he prefers them non-idealized.
George Washington was a nasty piece of work, a shallow, underhanded, social climbing blockhead. The cool kids (upper class military snobs) condescended to him because he was obviously a pathetic, fawning provincial jackass. Finally he got so fed up with the aristocratic system he turned his back on it, and became a better man for it. He learned how to operate in the world of realities rather than class,. He curbed his impatience dealing with the men under him, treating them men rather than inferiors. He dealt with his superiors with a respectful blend of firmness and flexibility. Washington became a crucial figure in the Revolution, earning as an enemy the respect of the very military establishment which had despised him as part of it.
As an aristocrat, Washington was contemptible; as a republican, he was giant among his peers. That's a hell of a better story than the version where he pops out the womb too honest to lie about the cherry tree.
That doesn't mean I can't enjoy Beowulf, even though he's basically a comic book character. Making him more plausible wouldn't improve his story the way making Washington plausible improves that story.
The study doesn't demonstrate that belief on some level is unnecessary. Nor does it show that belief is necessary. What it shows it that belief, if necessary, needn't have certain properties that it might plausibly be conjectured to require.
Suppose belief is necessary. This study shows that belief needn't be unqualified. I heard a study participant on the radio this morning, and she was incredulous, but she did *try* the placebo treatment. So if belief is necessary, it needn't be conscious or unqualified belief, at least in her case. Likewise this study shows that belief in the placebo needn't be mediated through some kind of plausible and specific mechanism. Belief per se is sufficient. We can't rule out credible deception as useful, but it is not necessary.
This line of inquiry is certainly very interesting. In the long run it might add to our understanding, not just of medication, but of mental health.
I won't lie and suggest there's any kind of supporting evidence for that statement. I am merely stating it in a confident and authoritative manner as a service to beer lovers everywhere.
Drink up, and think about what I have told you.
I won't insult your intelligence by asking you to to believe that drinking beer is slimming, I simply ask you to keep the notion in mind whenever you have a drink. It is the mere presence of this idea in your mind as you drink that does you good, not your belief nor any properties inherent in beer itself.
I trust businesses to provide me with internet service. That's their job. The government isn't going to do it, nor should it.
Can we examine that assumption for a moment?
Let's say we take the bottom line, non-negotiable assumptions on both sides of this question seriously:
(1) Private companies should not be told what to do with their private property.
(2) Citizens need infrastructure that gives them fair and unbiased access to information sources.
These two propositions only become irreconcilable if we add *your* proposition, that the government should not provide information infrastructure. Well, before we curb private property rights or freedom of access to information, why not examine that assumption critically?
Sure, building national and local networks is a complex and costly undertaking. But so is building transportation networks, and governments manage to do that. Maybe it's not with perfect efficiency, but it's good enough to be justifiable in most citizens' opinion. All the bureaucracy and contracting shenanigans involved with pubic road building are offset to by the benefit of free and unfettered access to transport for personal use and commerce. Well, a lot of the personal uses and commerce that once was conducted over the highway system is now conducted over the Internet.
If we *did* examine this question seriously, I think we'd find from the reactions of Internet providers is that the real sticking point for them isn't the civil libertarian position that the government shouldn't regulate the use of private property. What they're really protecting is a dream of a reliable cash cow that produces a steady stream of revenue without requiring much inventiveness or originality on their part. Well, I feel sorry for them if that dream doesn't pan out, but it's not *my* problem.
There's lots of government services that would be fine cash cows for private vendors. If there were no public fire protection, the very futility of protecting your home while your neighbor's unprotected home burns makes private fire insurance a wonderful cash cow. Think of all those vendors whose right to make a profit is harmed by the public service! Even so, it's fair to say that nearly every service that the government provides is *also* a splendid opportunity businesses that add value to those services. For the public police, you have security firms and private investigators. For fire protection, you have risk managers who tell you how to protect your property. For Medicare, you have supplemental insurance that doesn't have to cover the hard luck cases.
You can make the argument that public Internet service would just be lousy. But that too would be a business opportunity for the vendors. Public transit doesn't kill the market for private cars or taxi service after all. It takes cars off the road, making life better for the middle class and affluent people who'd rather sit comfortably in their SUVs than rub shoulders with the teeming masses. So let the masses have the free, lousy Internet, supporting new businesses and uses. Then sell your premium service to the affluent at profitable prices.
But of course, that's not the scenario Internet providers are afraid of, because premium service is not a niche they occupy. They're afraid of the government taking over the niche they *do* occupy: crummy service that most people can manage to live with.
The problem with math instruction is that faults in that instruction accumulate, until the student is rendered incapable of further progress.
The math we ask most students to master, say up to basic calculus, isn't really very hard. Geometry is probably the most fundamentally difficult topic, but we typically teach it in a pretty self-contained way. The problem with something like calculus is that if a student's grasp of a single prerequisite skill falls short, say in factoring polynomials, his advancement in calculus is crippled. Because we don't precisely measure and characterize a student's accomplishments beyond ridiculously coarse figures ("he's got a B average in pre-algebra"), we set students up for increasingly certain failure as the number of otherwise "minor" or "narrow" holes in his mathematics education increases.
I believe that we should *never* take a statement like "I'm no good at math" at face value. What would be more accurate in most cases is to say, "I'm not adequately *prepared* to progress in math."
Well leaving aside the dubious notion that studying applied subjects is really pursuing "technocracy", I think we're engaging in a bit of false dichotomy here. You don't have to choose as an individual or as a society to pursue liberal arts or applied arts; to study philosophy or to study engineering.
The medieval liberal arts curriculum had two levels. The Trivium consisted of grammar, logic and rhetoric. These are the basic tools of expression, thinking and persuasion. A student versed in the Trivium can write a persuasive argument that is understandable and well thought out. He can likewise recognize errors in argument and techniques of persuasion that give poor arguments more weight than they deserve.
These are critical skills for an engineer, who must persuade clients to take his proposals, or argue for one approach to a problem over another based, not just on feasibility, but the goals of the organization. It's a very common complaint among engineers that they know what has to be done but they aren't listened to. It seldom occurs to them to study the tools of persuasion so they can understand how those tools are being used against them.
The higher level of study was called the Quadrivium, consisting of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. This is a bit misleading, because the study of music was not the study of performance, nor was astronomy the study of observational astronomy. They were both effectively branches of applied math. Having mastered the basics of making sound and persuasive arguments in the Trivium, the student then studied advanced and logically exacting arguments in arithmetic and geometry, and practiced the application of these advanced skills in music and astronomy.
The choice of subjects in this program is probably not what we'd choose today. It isn't hard to come up with any number of reasonable ways to update this curriculum. For example, with arabic numerals we could roll the calculation aspects of arithmetic into logic in the Trivium, and replace the advanced aspects of arithmetic in the Quadrivium with mathematical analysis through calculus. But what we should not lose sight of is the *aim* of the Trivium/Quadrivium program: to produce a student who at age twenty one or so is well prepared to take on the study of *any* specialized field such as law, medicine or engineering.
That aim is gone from the modern conception of liberal arts, because in practice the aims of a modern liberal arts education are *vocational*. It is expected that when you get a bachelor's degree, you are prepared to take up a specialized career. In some cases such as engineering or labor relations, that expectation is *explicit*. In others, such as art history or English literature, I'd argue that there is an *implicit* assumption that this is job training. You are fitted to pursue advanced studies in one field, or perhaps to teach that field at the high school level, even though it is extremely unlikely that you will pursue those careers.
So we treat what we call a "liberal arts" education today as if it were a robust fundamental education, but we organize the actual instruction to pursue narrow vocational goals. We de-emphasize the rigorous mental discipline of mathematics and at replace that, if at all, with training in its handiest applied methods. The most serious drawback of this pseudo-vocational training is that its value fades with time. What you learned about psychology or electrical engineering in the 1980s may largely be obsolete.
This confounding of fundamental education and vocational training leads to a serious structural fault in how our society organizes education. We don't expect most people to continue educating themselves after the age 21 or so. That might be tolerable if we gave them strong training in rigorous thought along with using and recognizing the techniques of persuasion. But the education we give students at the bachelor's level does not really set them apart from somebody who gets a certificate from a trade school
Because they *can*. As far back as the landmark 1972 HEW report on Computers Records and the Rights of Citizens, the dangerous tendency to automatically file everything in computerized record keeping systems was obvious. The marginal cost of storing a record was lower than it had ever been before. Why not file everything you can get your hands on? You might find a use for it later. Well, it turns out there's all kinds of really bad things that can happen, especially if that information gives access to somebody else's credit. It didn't take a fortune teller to figure that out. People who bothered to think about this problem back in the *Nixon* administration realized how serious a problem knee-jerk record retention was.
Now back in the early 90s, I designed a set of payment processing business procedures with CPA friend of mine, and we had a big fight with the VP of marketing who had visions of telemarketing operators pulling up credit card numbers from caller ID. Of course that gave those same operators the ability to pull up any customer's credit card information just by typing their name. Anybody who has access to a backup tape could do some serious damage, and if he had half a brain he probably wouldn't get caught for a long time. So we simply refused to do it, citing standard accounting anti-fraud procedures. And nobody was going to order us to do differently, because we made it clear that wouldn't happen without a document trail that would make the responsibility for the decision crystal clear if anything went wrong.
What happened since then is that standards of financial responsibility have fallen dramatically in the rush to make a quick buck in ecommerce. It has nothing to do with some brave new world of technology and everything to do with laziness and greed. People have always done it, and it's always been sloppy. Customers are to blame too. They love the convenience of not having to fish out their credit card and type it in every time they buy something, until they get their identity stolen.
Well it goes too far to conflate being covered by the collective agreement and "joining", although I'd agree that paying full dues to the union is tantamount to joining.
If the collective bargaining agreement says, "these are the rules for promotion", then obviously that's binding for all employees in a certain position whether they're union or not. The whole *point* of such rules is to protect union members from management favoritism (e.g. retaliating against a good worker for joining the union by passing him over). The same goes for paying non-union workers differently than union workers -- at least paying them *more*. I suppose management could pay them *less*, but that's an obviously stupid thing to do.
Insofar as things like raises and work rules have to be negotiated for everyone, there is no way to avoid benefiting from these particular union services. But there are union services that you *can* avoid using, such as grievance procedures that protect members from unfair treatment. So I don't think everybody ought to pay the full union dues if they choose not to avail themselves of those services.
The problem with union elections is the problem with democracy everywhere: people don't put enough critical thought into how they vote. If you don't *like* the way a union is run; if you think it is not beneficial to workers to have such inflexible work rules, the best cure would be to join, then advocate your position. But like everywhere else, people tend to leave thinking about the issues to specialists, often who aren't workers at all, but lawyers and university trained bureaucrats. There's nothing wrong with specialists, as long as the people they're working for pay enough attention to keep them on track.
It's an imperfect world, the answer isn't to complain about the lousy job other people are doing of fixing problems. It's to roll up your sleeves and get involved yourself.
Fair enough, but even personal experience has its limitations.
The city I grew up in had a lot of bad cops. Cops that were too enthusiastic about using their nightsticks. Cops who were on the take. Cops who planted evidence. That means that if I'm ever on a jury evaluating a defense's claim that evidence was planted, I'd consider that to be a real possibility. But I won't take it as given based on the sweeping generalization that *all* cops routinely plant evidence. I'll look at all the supporting evidence then decide whether the specific claim of tampering has enough merit to raise reasonable doubt.
People either overestimate or underestimate the value of experience. When they *don't* have experience, they tend to discount it. When the *do* have it, they are subject to confirmation bias.
The question in this case is whether the specific claims made by the union have any merit. It is not whether unions are good or bad. You can use your opinion of unions in general to establish an a priori confidence in this union's specific claims, but that is not the same as having a justifiable basis for a conclusive opinion about those claims.
I think a reasonable test for whether you are using personal experience wisely is this: can you think of a scenario in which you would revise an opinion based largely on your experience? If there is no such scenario, then even your initial estimate of a claim's credibility is suspect.
The infrastructure that carries most Internet traffic is privately underwritten. But the infrastructure is *not* the Internet. The Internet is a set o protocols.
So what these companies want to do is to redefine the protocols as they run over the infrastructure they own or control. Looked at from one standpoint, this is entirely reasonable. It's their tubes after all, so why can't they redefine the protocols do be whatever the hell the damn well please?
Because the reason that infrastructure was worth the investment in the first place was those protocols. There were dialup services like AOL before the Internet. They were OK, but they weren't a huge bonanza. ISDN existed before the Internet, and in many ways represented a different, point to point connection vision of computer communication that was quite sophisticated in its way. It never took off.
But the Internet took off. Even when most consumers had just dial-up Internet, it took off, cost justifying an investment in broadband like ISDN never did, because of network neutrality. And now that the free and nondiscriminatory architecture of the Internet has made widespread broadband data networking feasible, the providers want to turn back the clock to the days of AOL. They want to run the Internet the way they've been running cell networks, steering users to their preferred information providers.
Is that right? Well if the only thing that mattered was ownership of the tubes, it would be right.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the "Don't be evil" business was a PR sham. It may have been hubris though.
Page and Brin were CS PhD students when they came up with the idea for PageRank. Google may be the first company that was built around algorithms. And when they decided they needed a CEO with business background, they chose Schmidt, who was one of the co-authors of lex, the Unix lexical analyzer.
I think people at Google thought they were exceptional, that they were smart enough to succeed without the ethical compromises most people feel they have to make in order to get a shot at the brass ring. There may be something to this as a marketing identity. Google depends on being trusted by its users more than most companies would be.
The problem with "Don't be Evil" is that it's an impossible standard if you take it to mean never make a mistake. In the real world, things (such as street view) are seldom purely good, people differ on what is "good", and well-intentioned people make mistakes.
China was a case in point. Different philosophical models of ethics suggest different views of trying to play within the Chinese government rules. Google's choice was apparently based on a consequentialist projection of the impact of their actions. The reasoning goes that the people in China aren't going to get access to a censorship-free search engine no matter what Google decides. Therefore Google's action wouldn't result in any novel harm to its users, and Google would have a position from which to push for greater liberalization. So from a utilitarian viewpoint, Google's participation in China's censorship was at worst morally neutral, and possibly slightly positive.
From a deontological standpoint, however, Google's participation in Chinese censorship is reprehensible, because it is actively participating in stripping its users of their human rights. Whether or not the regime *needs* Google to accomplish this is irrelevant.
This is not such an easy kind of conflict to resolve. Most of us who aren't professional philosophers tend to use a little of each style of ethics because neither style of ethics consistently yields answers that seem right to us.
"Be worthy of trust" might be a better motto for Google, because it captures the essential about the ethics of Google's relationship to its customers without opening up cans of worms like whose definition of "evil" to use.
Never in my life has engineering been seen as a glamorous profession, or a road to riches. Back in the early 80s when I was in school, if you told someone you were an engineer at best you'd get a little respect for being able to do something not everyone could. But you didn't get the kind of personal interest you' get if you said you were pre-med. Even if you were *pre-law*, people assumed you might be headed for great things, maybe even fabulous wealth and prestige, although that was highly unlikely. If you were an engineering student, people would assume that you were headed for a comfortable, middle-class suburban lifestyle with well above median income, but nothing like riches.
And that assumption was not only accurate, it was good for engineering as a profession.
Engineering was something you did because you had an affinity for it. You weren't persuaded to take it up, you must needed to know the effort you put into learning it would be repaid with a career. Now there's a lot more effort put into teaching elementary student about what engineering is like, which is a good thing, but no effort like that will ever do as much as the prospect of a steady career with plenty of good jobs.
Up until the 70s it was common to spend one's entire career in a single company, or perhaps no more than three or four. Now it's as common to change careers as it was once to change jobs.
Until the end of the Cold War, the engineering job market (and physics job market as well) was supported by projects undertaken for national prestige. After the Cold War, we looked for a "peace dividend" -- in other words we wanted to cash out of our investments in our national future. Free trade was part of that. The ideology of free trade is anti-nationalistic. The global system works better, produces more wealth, when trade barriers are removed. But if you are a country that had amassed as much wealth as the US, there was nothing that you could do that couldn't be done more cheaply elsewhere.
That includes innovation.
Innovation is a type of labor that can be purchased like any other kind of labor. So really there is at present no more reason for America to be a center of innovation than there is for America to be a center of manufacturing. There is no reason for young Americans to train themselves in disciplines that won't offer them careers.
The only reason to intervene in this natural course of events is nationalistic, the desire to make Americans as a people better paid than their counterparts elsewhere.
I believe in significant anthropogenic contributions to climate change, but I am far from certain we can turn back the clock. We ought to take the notion that the world is heading towards a new climate equilibrium no matter what we do as a serious possibility.
That doesn't mean we should give up on greenhouse emissions because there's a big difference between getting there in,say fifty years vs eighty or a hundred.
This is not the kind of thing we can know with the kind of certainty we'd like. Somebody with serious intellectual ability needs to look at all the reasonably likely scenarios and their probabilities and develop a rational framework (not just picking your preferred scenario ) for taking them all into account when making policy, whether that is simply maximizing expected economic growth, some kind of mini-max strategy or maybe (in the case of runaway warming ) some way to compensate people who didn't benefit from greenhouse emissions but pay the costs.
Sorry, but it turns out that all the facts about XFCE's resource usage are warm and squishy, and a lot of folks prefer it that way.
I agree with you so far as you go, but there is one factor in the cost effectiveness equation you haven't considered: effectiveness.
The effectiveness of either the manual system or the high tech system are limited by the fact that people who want to cross the border illegally will inevitably find ways of getting into the country that are outside the specifications of either system. The difference is you can disband the guard posts every hundred yards when you find out that it doesn't work. With the high tech system you have a very expensive white elephant on your hands. Worst of all is the political need to justify the sunk costs, because you're never seeing that money again. That means we'd have ended up dumping more money into the failed system until there's a change of administration or even the stink is so bad even supporters of the system have to distance themselves from it.
If you're going to keep dumping money into a system trying to change it, go with a manual one if you can. You can adapt a labor based system by moving the labor into other places doing completely different kinds tasks. The guys manning the guard towers can be shifted to inspecting the produce trucks. With the high tech system you've got to issue an RFP for what amounts to *another* expensive system to extend its capabilities.
I'm not saying that an automated, high tech system isn't something we'd want to do eventually, but spending eight billion on a system to do something that's (a) we have not yet demonstrated we know how to do and (b) has intelligent opponents who can shift strategy and tactics -- that sounds like a recipe for waste to me. Play a few serious game theoretic rounds with the opponents, and when you think you've reached some kind of strategic equilibrium then dump money into a high tech system.
No, what you want to do is send your sample subjects on an easter egg hunt, and see who gets the most eggs in the time allotted.
Bingo. Know your customer. *REALLY* know your customer.
That means more than knowing what kind of stuff he says is cool. That's easy because most people say the same things without thinking very much. But that doesn't cut it because most customers will do at least some thinking before they pull out the checkbook. You've got to know what will shift him from thinking about all the reasons for *not* buying product into thinking of all the reasons *to* buy it, without killing you later with support costs.
Don't leaves this to sales guys taking the customer out for a beer. You need somebody with a longer term perspective than the next sale really studying the customer, preferably in his natural habitat. What will *his* customers pay him or punish him for? Who does he have to justify himself to? What is his workplace like? What products and technology are there? What are his employees like?
I did this for many years ... seat of the pants marketing. I'm not particularly proud of my ignorance of formal marketing techniques, but gosh I knew the people using our product, in some ways better than they usually did themselves.
One time a manager told me his field guys would never use our product. They hated anything new. He even predicted they'd take the equipment and run it over with their trucks. So I said, "watch this." I walked into the briefing room, stood up in front of all those beefy, foul-mouthed working class guys and said, "When you start using this thing you can stop filling out your end-of-day paperwork. Just put it in the charging stand, punch out, and go home." Case closed. I didn't patronize these guys because they didn't have a college degree. I spoke to something they cared about.
Sure. The problem is that multiple proven, highly effective ways of losing customers are so closely related to quick and cheesy ways of adding new features. I'll name a few:
* Adding bugs.
* Adding complexity.
* Overloading support.
* Slowing maintenance.
* Making just about everything more expensive, including features customers will decide they need in the future.
I could go on and on, but this is enough to show that going on a new feature spree isn't a no-brainer.
Now from a marketing perspective, who does this better than anyone else? Apple. For many years Apple earned the sneers of tech heads everywhere by keeping its products on a strict feature budget. They *never* introduce a product that does everything you could easily imagine it doing. Instead they:
(a) do a really nice job on the features they deliver and
(b) regularly release a *small* number of new features, small enough they can really hit the marketing ball out of the park when they explain to customers why they absolutely *have* to chuck their old iPod and buy a new one.
The second point is really the key. Apple doesn't get ahead of themselves, they never do it all in one go. Sometimes the new features are really quite impressive, other times they're things Apple could easily have done earlier, but they've timed to nudge the herd down the upgrade track.
The first gen Touch didn't have a built in speaker. That's not a deal breaker, because the first gen was so cool. Then Apple introduced the second gen, which really was only a tiny bit spiffier, but it *did* have a speaker. Then every time a happy 1st gen owner could have used that feature, he'd be thinking, "Gee I love my 1st gen, but I'd be just a *little* bit happier if I bought a 2nd gen." This leaves *everyone* happy. The owner now has his spiffy new iPod with speaker, and Apple has sold two nearly identical devices to a customer for much less than twice the cost.
The only people who are unhappy are cranks who insist on believing Apple does features this way because it's too stupid to come up with new features or see their value to the customer. It's *because* they see the value of new features that they dole them out this way, so they get the greatest possible mileage out of them.
Step back for a second and look at what's happening.
On one hand, the companies giving up their seed corn aren't being forced to literally at gun point. They're deciding that at this moment, they're better living another day and starving tomorrow. So in a sense it's a win-win scenario.
On the other hand, the enterprise benefiting from this exploits government backing to take a longer term view of the transaction than the companies developing the technology can afford. So in a different it's not a win/win scenario; it's a win/minimize-your-losses proposition.
So China wins here not by being more ingenious or creating new knowledge or technology, but by exploiting its ability to control the rules of the game. If you twist your vision enough, I suppose that what it is doing in this case might look like innovation.
China is a nation with tremendous human resources and ingenuity, but it *also* exploits the fact that it is the only major economic power on earth still pursuing a kind of mercantilist trade policy.
Now what's really interesting is that an act of purported terrorism (the burning of the Reichstag building) convinced the Reichstag to give Hitler temporary "emergency" powers.
We already have a lot of people who've bought into the idea that in "war" (defined as just about any kind of national security problem) the President's Constitutional powers are just about unconditional. Those people are nearly all Republicans -- I don't want to paint *all* Republicans with this brush, but there is an extreme wing of the party that believes this. Palin is part of that wing.
I don't think Palin beating Obama is likely, once people see them head to head in debate, even if Palin plays the expectations game. But I don't think her beating Obama is entire implausible given the right conditions.
Well, that's not *exactly* like the Pentagon Papers. In the case of the Pentagon Papers, the executive branch was hiding the fact that it exceeded its constitutional authority. That motivation matters.
That doesn't mean that Wikileaks was unjustified here, only that assigning persons or groups to analogous roles isn't enough. The specific motives the government has to keep something secret and the public interest in having that piece of information revealed are what matters.
I have no way of knowing the criteria Wikileaks used to release the cables to outside organizations, but unless they can guarantee responsible handling of the data by the recipient, sending data to a third party for screening does *not* automatically let them off the hook. Of course, if they have identified a potentially important issue that needs to be revealed, running that by a relatively trustworthy third party would be a very responsible way of doing it.
Specifics matter. One of the most important here is that Wikileaks has no particular duty not to embarrass the United States or even undermine some of its foreign policy initiatives (e.g. on climate change treaties). So in the case of things like arm twisting on Copenhagen, there's a reasonable justification for them to reveal the data. In other cases the data released seems unreasonable to me, specifically revealing foreign infrastructure which the US is strategically dependent upon. That's something I'd look at very, very carefully before passing on, because even if I hate the US, I can't overlook the possibility I'm inviting trouble for people working at those installations.
Overall, most of the stuff that came out is just embarrassing. That's neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned. We'll survive, and Wikileaks doesn't have any duty not to embarrass us.
I could make a case for recording government officials 24/7.
Sure, you *could* make a case, but it wouldn't be a *reasonable* case. I like a good reductio ad absurdum too, but you can't live under rules constructed solely around extreme cases. "Reasonableness" is the secret sauce that makes living under *any* system of rules tolerable, because *no* system of rules covers every contingency.
You use "reasonableness" this way. You ask yourself, would a reasonable person accept a deal under the proposed rules? Not a paranoid person; not a saint; nor a radical. An ordinary, well informed person, applying sensible standards. If a reasonable person wouldn't accept 24/7 surveillance as the price of a government job, that tells you one of two possible things about people who *would* accept the job. Either (1) they do not make decisions in ways that would seem to you to be reasonable, or (2) they have no intention of playing by the rules.
The "reasonableness" criteria means you don't just sweep things into simplistic categories (in my opinion). You examine the circumstances. True, the diplomatic cables in the Wikileaks case are government documents the government doesn't want you to see, just like the Pentagon Papers. That doesn't mean that releasing the cables is automatically equally reasonable to releasing the Pentagon Papers, because they are different *kinds* of documents from different situations. You have to make the case for each release individually.
If you like reductio, here's one. Suppose that a US embassy internal report says that a particular dissident is planning to get his family out of some country before the regime takes reprisals against them for his speaking his mind. Like the Pentagon Papers, this is a government document that our government doesn't want you to read. The circumstances are different, because the government's reason for keeping this secret is different. In this case, as soon as the knowledge about the dissident becomes public that regime *will* attack that dissident's family. In the case of the Pentagon Papers, the executive branch wanted to conceal the fact that the President had exceeded his constitutional authority.
I have no love for a lot of the "American Left" as most would think of it, nor for the "Right". But this is just fucking stupid.
I've lived long enough that I've gone from the right side of the political spectrum to the left side without moving one damned inch. One thing I've never been able stomach is weasely claim that both sides are just the same. That's the argument people make when they want to stop paying attention.
We aren't talking about whether to join the "left" social club or the "right".We're talking about an issue of public policy -- whether vendors of network services should be allowed to control consumers' access to information. Now there is a kind of equivalence here, I suppose, in that both sides have some good points to make. But that doesn't mean that the positions are equivalent.
I wrote him off during the Clinton administration when he went on a rant about the looks of Chelsea Clinton. Now, Bill and Hillary were fair game, but at the time Chelsea who was something like twelve at the time, didn't ask for any of that. When he was called on that, he said he was an entertainer, not a journalist. That tells you everything you need to know about the man. He's a bully and coward isn't man enough to apologize for a cheap shot at a little girl.
You make it sound like working incrementally is some kind of clever stratagem by the left. Let me tell you, the small number of people on the left in the US are not at all for incrementalism. For example, they don't want health insurance reform, or even health insurance reform with a public option. The left hates the "public option" just as much as the right. What they want is single payer.
What confuses people is that the left has no media clout. Sure, there's Michael Moore, but the right gets more out of him as a whipping boy than the left does in terms of seeing its policies enacted.
The "leftist incrementalism" you are talking about is really just centrist pragmatism. The centrists want health insurance form, are open to single payer as a feature of that, but aren't going to go to the mat for it. Centrists are the furthest right that is visible in this country, except on a few narrow Internet based forums. Nancy Pelosi is the media's idea of a hard core left winger? The left hates her as much if not *more* than the right does. They just do it in private because they don't have a platform.
Because a thinking person prefers his idealized heroes fictional. As for his non-fictional heroes, he prefers them non-idealized.
George Washington was a nasty piece of work, a shallow, underhanded, social climbing blockhead. The cool kids (upper class military snobs) condescended to him because he was obviously a pathetic, fawning provincial jackass. Finally he got so fed up with the aristocratic system he turned his back on it, and became a better man for it. He learned how to operate in the world of realities rather than class,. He curbed his impatience dealing with the men under him, treating them men rather than inferiors. He dealt with his superiors with a respectful blend of firmness and flexibility. Washington became a crucial figure in the Revolution, earning as an enemy the respect of the very military establishment which had despised him as part of it.
As an aristocrat, Washington was contemptible; as a republican, he was giant among his peers. That's a hell of a better story than the version where he pops out the womb too honest to lie about the cherry tree.
That doesn't mean I can't enjoy Beowulf, even though he's basically a comic book character. Making him more plausible wouldn't improve his story the way making Washington plausible improves that story.
Right.
The study doesn't demonstrate that belief on some level is unnecessary. Nor does it show that belief is necessary. What it shows it that belief, if necessary, needn't have certain properties that it might plausibly be conjectured to require.
Suppose belief is necessary. This study shows that belief needn't be unqualified. I heard a study participant on the radio this morning, and she was incredulous, but she did *try* the placebo treatment. So if belief is necessary, it needn't be conscious or unqualified belief, at least in her case. Likewise this study shows that belief in the placebo needn't be mediated through some kind of plausible and specific mechanism. Belief per se is sufficient. We can't rule out credible deception as useful, but it is not necessary.
This line of inquiry is certainly very interesting. In the long run it might add to our understanding, not just of medication, but of mental health.
I won't lie and suggest there's any kind of supporting evidence for that statement. I am merely stating it in a confident and authoritative manner as a service to beer lovers everywhere.
Drink up, and think about what I have told you.
I won't insult your intelligence by asking you to to believe that drinking beer is slimming, I simply ask you to keep the notion in mind whenever you have a drink. It is the mere presence of this idea in your mind as you drink that does you good, not your belief nor any properties inherent in beer itself.
I trust businesses to provide me with internet service. That's their job. The government isn't going to do it, nor should it.
Can we examine that assumption for a moment?
Let's say we take the bottom line, non-negotiable assumptions on both sides of this question seriously:
(1) Private companies should not be told what to do with their private property.
(2) Citizens need infrastructure that gives them fair and unbiased access to information sources.
These two propositions only become irreconcilable if we add *your* proposition, that the government should not provide information infrastructure. Well, before we curb private property rights or freedom of access to information, why not examine that assumption critically?
Sure, building national and local networks is a complex and costly undertaking. But so is building transportation networks, and governments manage to do that. Maybe it's not with perfect efficiency, but it's good enough to be justifiable in most citizens' opinion. All the bureaucracy and contracting shenanigans involved with pubic road building are offset to by the benefit of free and unfettered access to transport for personal use and commerce. Well, a lot of the personal uses and commerce that once was conducted over the highway system is now conducted over the Internet.
If we *did* examine this question seriously, I think we'd find from the reactions of Internet providers is that the real sticking point for them isn't the civil libertarian position that the government shouldn't regulate the use of private property. What they're really protecting is a dream of a reliable cash cow that produces a steady stream of revenue without requiring much inventiveness or originality on their part. Well, I feel sorry for them if that dream doesn't pan out, but it's not *my* problem.
There's lots of government services that would be fine cash cows for private vendors. If there were no public fire protection, the very futility of protecting your home while your neighbor's unprotected home burns makes private fire insurance a wonderful cash cow. Think of all those vendors whose right to make a profit is harmed by the public service! Even so, it's fair to say that nearly every service that the government provides is *also* a splendid opportunity businesses that add value to those services. For the public police, you have security firms and private investigators. For fire protection, you have risk managers who tell you how to protect your property. For Medicare, you have supplemental insurance that doesn't have to cover the hard luck cases.
You can make the argument that public Internet service would just be lousy. But that too would be a business opportunity for the vendors. Public transit doesn't kill the market for private cars or taxi service after all. It takes cars off the road, making life better for the middle class and affluent people who'd rather sit comfortably in their SUVs than rub shoulders with the teeming masses. So let the masses have the free, lousy Internet, supporting new businesses and uses. Then sell your premium service to the affluent at profitable prices.
But of course, that's not the scenario Internet providers are afraid of, because premium service is not a niche they occupy. They're afraid of the government taking over the niche they *do* occupy: crummy service that most people can manage to live with.
The problem with math instruction is that faults in that instruction accumulate, until the student is rendered incapable of further progress.
The math we ask most students to master, say up to basic calculus, isn't really very hard. Geometry is probably the most fundamentally difficult topic, but we typically teach it in a pretty self-contained way. The problem with something like calculus is that if a student's grasp of a single prerequisite skill falls short, say in factoring polynomials, his advancement in calculus is crippled. Because we don't precisely measure and characterize a student's accomplishments beyond ridiculously coarse figures ("he's got a B average in pre-algebra"), we set students up for increasingly certain failure as the number of otherwise "minor" or "narrow" holes in his mathematics education increases.
I believe that we should *never* take a statement like "I'm no good at math" at face value. What would be more accurate in most cases is to say, "I'm not adequately *prepared* to progress in math."
Well leaving aside the dubious notion that studying applied subjects is really pursuing "technocracy", I think we're engaging in a bit of false dichotomy here. You don't have to choose as an individual or as a society to pursue liberal arts or applied arts; to study philosophy or to study engineering.
The medieval liberal arts curriculum had two levels. The Trivium consisted of grammar, logic and rhetoric. These are the basic tools of expression, thinking and persuasion. A student versed in the Trivium can write a persuasive argument that is understandable and well thought out. He can likewise recognize errors in argument and techniques of persuasion that give poor arguments more weight than they deserve.
These are critical skills for an engineer, who must persuade clients to take his proposals, or argue for one approach to a problem over another based, not just on feasibility, but the goals of the organization. It's a very common complaint among engineers that they know what has to be done but they aren't listened to. It seldom occurs to them to study the tools of persuasion so they can understand how those tools are being used against them.
The higher level of study was called the Quadrivium, consisting of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. This is a bit misleading, because the study of music was not the study of performance, nor was astronomy the study of observational astronomy. They were both effectively branches of applied math. Having mastered the basics of making sound and persuasive arguments in the Trivium, the student then studied advanced and logically exacting arguments in arithmetic and geometry, and practiced the application of these advanced skills in music and astronomy.
The choice of subjects in this program is probably not what we'd choose today. It isn't hard to come up with any number of reasonable ways to update this curriculum. For example, with arabic numerals we could roll the calculation aspects of arithmetic into logic in the Trivium, and replace the advanced aspects of arithmetic in the Quadrivium with mathematical analysis through calculus. But what we should not lose sight of is the *aim* of the Trivium/Quadrivium program: to produce a student who at age twenty one or so is well prepared to take on the study of *any* specialized field such as law, medicine or engineering.
That aim is gone from the modern conception of liberal arts, because in practice the aims of a modern liberal arts education are *vocational*. It is expected that when you get a bachelor's degree, you are prepared to take up a specialized career. In some cases such as engineering or labor relations, that expectation is *explicit*. In others, such as art history or English literature, I'd argue that there is an *implicit* assumption that this is job training. You are fitted to pursue advanced studies in one field, or perhaps to teach that field at the high school level, even though it is extremely unlikely that you will pursue those careers.
So we treat what we call a "liberal arts" education today as if it were a robust fundamental education, but we organize the actual instruction to pursue narrow vocational goals. We de-emphasize the rigorous mental discipline of mathematics and at replace that, if at all, with training in its handiest applied methods. The most serious drawback of this pseudo-vocational training is that its value fades with time. What you learned about psychology or electrical engineering in the 1980s may largely be obsolete.
This confounding of fundamental education and vocational training leads to a serious structural fault in how our society organizes education. We don't expect most people to continue educating themselves after the age 21 or so. That might be tolerable if we gave them strong training in rigorous thought along with using and recognizing the techniques of persuasion. But the education we give students at the bachelor's level does not really set them apart from somebody who gets a certificate from a trade school
Because they *can*. As far back as the landmark 1972 HEW report on Computers Records and the Rights of Citizens, the dangerous tendency to automatically file everything in computerized record keeping systems was obvious. The marginal cost of storing a record was lower than it had ever been before. Why not file everything you can get your hands on? You might find a use for it later. Well, it turns out there's all kinds of really bad things that can happen, especially if that information gives access to somebody else's credit. It didn't take a fortune teller to figure that out. People who bothered to think about this problem back in the *Nixon* administration realized how serious a problem knee-jerk record retention was.
Now back in the early 90s, I designed a set of payment processing business procedures with CPA friend of mine, and we had a big fight with the VP of marketing who had visions of telemarketing operators pulling up credit card numbers from caller ID. Of course that gave those same operators the ability to pull up any customer's credit card information just by typing their name. Anybody who has access to a backup tape could do some serious damage, and if he had half a brain he probably wouldn't get caught for a long time. So we simply refused to do it, citing standard accounting anti-fraud procedures. And nobody was going to order us to do differently, because we made it clear that wouldn't happen without a document trail that would make the responsibility for the decision crystal clear if anything went wrong.
What happened since then is that standards of financial responsibility have fallen dramatically in the rush to make a quick buck in ecommerce. It has nothing to do with some brave new world of technology and everything to do with laziness and greed. People have always done it, and it's always been sloppy. Customers are to blame too. They love the convenience of not having to fish out their credit card and type it in every time they buy something, until they get their identity stolen.
Well it goes too far to conflate being covered by the collective agreement and "joining", although I'd agree that paying full dues to the union is tantamount to joining.
If the collective bargaining agreement says, "these are the rules for promotion", then obviously that's binding for all employees in a certain position whether they're union or not. The whole *point* of such rules is to protect union members from management favoritism (e.g. retaliating against a good worker for joining the union by passing him over). The same goes for paying non-union workers differently than union workers -- at least paying them *more*. I suppose management could pay them *less*, but that's an obviously stupid thing to do.
Insofar as things like raises and work rules have to be negotiated for everyone, there is no way to avoid benefiting from these particular union services. But there are union services that you *can* avoid using, such as grievance procedures that protect members from unfair treatment. So I don't think everybody ought to pay the full union dues if they choose not to avail themselves of those services.
The problem with union elections is the problem with democracy everywhere: people don't put enough critical thought into how they vote. If you don't *like* the way a union is run; if you think it is not beneficial to workers to have such inflexible work rules, the best cure would be to join, then advocate your position. But like everywhere else, people tend to leave thinking about the issues to specialists, often who aren't workers at all, but lawyers and university trained bureaucrats. There's nothing wrong with specialists, as long as the people they're working for pay enough attention to keep them on track.
It's an imperfect world, the answer isn't to complain about the lousy job other people are doing of fixing problems. It's to roll up your sleeves and get involved yourself.
In my personal experience...
Fair enough, but even personal experience has its limitations.
The city I grew up in had a lot of bad cops. Cops that were too enthusiastic about using their nightsticks. Cops who were on the take. Cops who planted evidence. That means that if I'm ever on a jury evaluating a defense's claim that evidence was planted, I'd consider that to be a real possibility. But I won't take it as given based on the sweeping generalization that *all* cops routinely plant evidence. I'll look at all the supporting evidence then decide whether the specific claim of tampering has enough merit to raise reasonable doubt.
People either overestimate or underestimate the value of experience. When they *don't* have experience, they tend to discount it. When the *do* have it, they are subject to confirmation bias.
The question in this case is whether the specific claims made by the union have any merit. It is not whether unions are good or bad. You can use your opinion of unions in general to establish an a priori confidence in this union's specific claims, but that is not the same as having a justifiable basis for a conclusive opinion about those claims.
I think a reasonable test for whether you are using personal experience wisely is this: can you think of a scenario in which you would revise an opinion based largely on your experience? If there is no such scenario, then even your initial estimate of a claim's credibility is suspect.
Well, it's more complicated than that.
The infrastructure that carries most Internet traffic is privately underwritten. But the infrastructure is *not* the Internet. The Internet is a set o protocols.
So what these companies want to do is to redefine the protocols as they run over the infrastructure they own or control. Looked at from one standpoint, this is entirely reasonable. It's their tubes after all, so why can't they redefine the protocols do be whatever the hell the damn well please?
Because the reason that infrastructure was worth the investment in the first place was those protocols. There were dialup services like AOL before the Internet. They were OK, but they weren't a huge bonanza. ISDN existed before the Internet, and in many ways represented a different, point to point connection vision of computer communication that was quite sophisticated in its way. It never took off.
But the Internet took off. Even when most consumers had just dial-up Internet, it took off, cost justifying an investment in broadband like ISDN never did, because of network neutrality. And now that the free and nondiscriminatory architecture of the Internet has made widespread broadband data networking feasible, the providers want to turn back the clock to the days of AOL. They want to run the Internet the way they've been running cell networks, steering users to their preferred information providers.
Is that right? Well if the only thing that mattered was ownership of the tubes, it would be right.