Err... Don't you think that's a bit, well, histrionic?
First of all, let's look at baselines and samples and that sort of question. If we administered a test to college freshman in 1910 and compared the results to college freshman of 2010, we'd be mortified if we looked at the percentage that passed some benchmark. But suppose we ask the question "if we took the top N students from each era, what percentage would meet some arbitrary level of proficiency". Now take N to be the number of ALL college freshman in 1910. 2010 would kick 1910's butt, because there are VASTLY more people going to college today.
That's clearly a test obviously slanted toward 2010. But comparing raw percentages is a test obviously slanted toward 1910, and has less rational justification.
Now, let's look as sampling. Suppose we administered the test every year for five years to some institution, and nothing fundamental changes about the world. Would we expect to get 30%, 30%, 30%, 30%, 30%? Of course not. It'd go up and down a few percentage points. It might go something like 30%, 24%, 23%, 29%, 25%, even if nothing had changed.
The fact that the test went from 30% to 25% over the course of several years immediately tells us that the numbers don't reflect a change in the overall population of students. The world does not change quickly enough to produce those kinds of dramatic swings in the population. The difference might well be statistical noise, but we shouldn't ignore *other* kinds of changes, ones not reflecting the state of the entire world. This could be a change at one institution.
If Waterloo wanted to raise the score on its test, it could simply alter its admission standards. Colleges are constantly tweaking their admission standards. This year we want more students with athletics, or performing arts backgrounds. We're switching from formula A to formula B in scoring. We've changed admission committee chairman. All kinds of things happen. That's not counting the fact that Waterloo has *competition* that's trying to take the best students away.
Even if we administered this test to all freshmen everywhere, and knew there was a systemic population decline in the ability to achieve a passing grade, that wouldn't necessarily mean the end is nigh. We'd have to administer a *battery* of tests covering a wide variety of skills. Maybe composing in standard grammar has been deemphasized (obviously a bad thing) and replaced with more education on critical reading (obviously a good thing). We could fix this if we wanted to by deemphasizing critical reading (obviously a bad thing) and emphasizing standard grammar more (obviously a good thing).
What does the test measure anyway? The ability to compose according to one arbitrary standard of what English grammar ought to be. As useful as being able to conform to the standard dialect is for the individual, it's not the only useful skill there is, or even the most useful one to society. I'd be more concerned about declining math ability in the population, provided we could define that reasonably and measure it accurately.
Pardon me, but it strikes me as a bit silly to say we can't supply our energy needs through renewable sources without defining "need".
We don't "need" what the energy companies provide at all. What we need are things produced with that energy.
It would be more sensible to state we can't take an economy based on abundant, cheap, and widely available fossil fuels, suddenly take those fossil fuels away, and expect it not to hurt. Stated that way, why would one expect one or two discrete sources of energy to be a suitable drop-in replacement for oil? The universe doesn't owe us a living on our own terms. Even if we could wave a magic wand and conjure up magic electricity plants that ran on nothing, it wouldn't be as nice (from our perspective) as waving a magic wand and having a boundless supply of oil to supply the systems we have in place today.
Here's an interesting thought experiment. Imagine the world of 1800, where industrial revolution is under way, powered by water driven mills and wind driven ships and animal driven land transport. Imagine that world as just like our own, except there was no oil or coal. It is very likely that if we look at that world in 2010, it is much less wealthy than ours, and as a result less technologically advanced in many areas. But it would not be a world frozen in the technology and economic development levels of 1800.
Peak oil is a big challenge for our society. But it's not one that necessarily means a return to the Stone Age. I think the challenge we face is to continue improving the level of human welfare as oil runs out. New energy sources are important, but they won't be enough. We'll have to be come more efficient per unit of human welfare. The good news is that we're extremely inefficient, so we have lots of room for improvement.
Our current inefficiency is not a moral failing as some would like to paint it. It's the inevitable result of a world with an abundant, cheap, easily available oil. What would be a moral failing is to ignore the challenge of this generation: to find a way to continue improving human welfare as this enormously helpful resource becomes scarce.
But you can't conjure the know-how and infrastructure to support a manufacturing economy out of thin air -- the industrial engineers who are current with the latest methods; the tool and die companies; the vendor and distributor relationships. Even though have some of the capacity, you can't scale that capacity up by an order of magnitude overnight. If Chinese trade suddenly disappeared, it would be a huge win for some businesses and for manufacturing workers, but it would take many years for other sources of manufacturing capacity to pick up all the slack. And prices would rise, simply from the supply curve shifting. There are places with cheaper labor than China, and places with more sophisticated labor, but no place with the volume of labor at the level of capability China has.
Of course China won't deliberately cut off trade because it can't afford to do it. They have their own problems. One of the things they learned in the Great Leap Forward is that you can't run an economy with grand political gestures. The way you change the average state of affairs is at the margins. Thousands of tiny steps over a decade or more work better than a Great Leap Forward over five years. It's also more stable because your failures as well as your successes are marginal.
There's no telling what a dramatic gesture would do to the successes built up over the last twenty years. China's growth has been as rapid as possible without being out of control, and already they are facing the Microsoft problem: being an enterprise that is dependent on consistent, runaway growth. Anything you are dependent upon is a vulnerability, whether that is guaranteed growth or foreign suppliers.
So the scenario where China deliberately decides to cut us off at the knees is not a credible one in the immediate future, because they'd be hurting themselves more than us. What we have to worry about are things that China might not have control over: war, civil unrest, corruption (both government and private), sloppy accounting and banking practices coming home to roost.
When those things start stressing Chinese politics, that's when you have to worry about the Grand Idiotic Gesture. There's always a few people in every group ready to cut themselves off at the knees to make an impressive political gesture. When things are going reasonably well people simply don't listen to them. But history has shown when faced with imminent disaster, people will readily hand power over to the most confident sounding person, who tends to be a politically cunning idiot. What's more, the idiot's failures initially solidify his hold on power. Things have to get immensely worse and continue worsening for a long time before people admit they made a stupid investment in a bad leader. Look around you, and you'll see that story played out time and time again.
I took my daughter to the hospital for a test, and admitting gave me clipboard full of papers, with instructions to sign them and initial all the circled places. I looked at the forms, and said, "Where the privacy rights disclosure?"
The person looked at be blankly. "What?" she asked.
"You're asking me to initial where it says I've received the privacy rights disclosure."
"Oh, you just need to initial that."
"May I have one?"
"Sure."
The clerk rooted around and found me one.
Now here's the point of this little parable. The average person's life is full of legal information overload. There is just so much meaningless crap that you have to agree to in order to get through life. I read everything carefully. So does my wife. It's a good idea, but it's also bit like going through life with sand in your gears.
You aren't expected to understand things you agree to. They don't want you to. This stuff is not there for your benefit. It's equally meaningless to the people you are dealing with directly. It's just there to be pulled out of the organization's hat in very, very rare circumstances ("Ha! We have your signature that says you received the disclosure booklet!"). Even then if you have a half-way decent lawyer it won't make any difference ("But it's ten pages of legal gobbledygook, and you can't expect people to go through their lives with a lawyer attached to their hip.")
Increasingly, doing business or even getting basic services like medical treatment involves going through some meaningless (or even worse, semi-meaningful) legal ceremony.
Let me suggest what I believe might be a novel term for this situation: "commitment pollution." "Commitment pollution" is when an average person is so deluged with incomprehensible or patently unenforceable commitments that he can no longer be sure what his rights and responsibilities are.
I believe there is an ethical duty of organizations not to produce commitment pollution, nor to exploit its effects to obtain formal but non-conscious concessions from consumers. For software or devices with software, that means simple understandable licenses and a clear explanation of how the rights the consumer is getting is less than the rights he would naively think.
I am not completely against DRM philosophically, but I think it needs careful regulation. It's dangerous because it gives vendors de facto, extralegal powers over the consumer that the consumer may not be aware of, or in some cases powers which harm society.
For example, when a vendor sells a DRM book reader to the public, does the public know that the vendor can "take back" books that they have purchased? Or that if the company goes out of business or sells its assets to a third party, that consumers could lose all the books they've bought without compensation?
The average person's response to commitment pollution is based on faith that we don't allow unconscionable agreements. But sometimes it's not possible to contain the impact on an unconscionable agreement. When a company goes out of business, there's nobody to hold to account.
That's probably my biggest problem with DRM. If the bulk of knowledge in the hands of the public is in the form of unregulated DRM, that knowledge could disappear when the companies providing the DRM infrastructure go out of business.
The obvious problem with your approach is sometimes people on both extremes of an argument pull their "facts" out of their ass.
The reason Fox is even less useful than most extreme information sources is that it has relatively less information. You can watch it for five minutes and figure out what the message of the day is. The only reason to watch it longer is to have it drilled into your worldview more firmly.
I'm pretty sure most people who own iPods have never watched a MacWorld keynote, and have only a vague idea of who Steven Jobs is. So it's a mistake to believe Apple survives on its fanboys.
I'm as mystified as you as to why anyone would buy this thing. But my point is that it may not be embodied in the device at all. We'll have to see the services and apps that are built for the thing, and that might not come out right at the launch either. That would be characteristic. They staged the introduction of iPhone/touch features more slowly than they might have.
I understand. I happen to hate the iTunes store. I much prefer Amazon's MP3 download service. It meets my needs. I don't much care for the way iTunes wants to steer me to the latest episode of popular TV shows. I have no interest in that, and I always feel like I'm fighting the software to get it to do what I want.
But one thing I've learned after decades in this business is that you can't design products around your own preferences. I've seen that approach fail time and time again. I've even seen the same guys make the same mistake more than once.
It doesn't matter that I hate the iTunes store. Steve Jobs would be an idiot to design products that cater to people like me, because we're lousy, cranky, critical customers and cheapskates besides.
Really? It makes me want to never invest in a Japanese company that makes washing machines. It's a frelling agitator for crying out loud. Why does it need fuzzy logic at all?
I couldn't begin to do justice to this guy's passion for his work, but of course it's nuts to care that much about how to swish clothes more effectively. But the thing about mass produced goods is that what matters is marginal costs. Good design is the feature with the cheapest marginal cost of all. Maybe the computer control went in because it simplified the control system and made the thing cheaper to make, but once you'd done that it doesn't really cost any more to see if you can make it a tiny bit better.
In any case, I just don't believe in betting for the company whose employees are going through the motions asleep out of bed and against the company that has people who love their work.
"We choose not to go to the moon because not enough of the voters care enough about doing that to have their taxes raised or to give up enough other stuff to pay for a credible effort."
?
That's not exactly thrilling rhetoric, but its hard to argue with.
A really, really good unmanned probe would cost less than a half-assed attempt to put a man any place in the solar system other than Earth. I'd even argue that the people who desperately want to see progress towards human space colonization would be better off backing a series of successful, cheap unmanned missions than going through the motions of planning a manned mission without the money to do it succesfully.
There are only two compelling reasons to back manned space exploration in the short term, in my opinion. One is to further our study of the human body's ability to participate in larger, more ambitious planned missions in the future. This pretty much amounts to keeping our manned options open. The second is a fire in our national belly to see an American standing on the Moon, or Mars.
If you want Americans to pony up for that, you've got to (a) convince us our national prestige is on the line and (b) convince us to care about that. I don't think Americans care that much about national prestige any longer. We don't have anything against it, but from what I can see, the notion of actually sacrificing anything for that purpose is repugnant to most of us.
Yes, vast numbers of people living in crushing poverty are a drain on the Indian economy and a potentially destabilizing influence on its government. But India is huge, period. There are more people living in middle class conditions in India than there are Americans total.
Well, India is an economy that needs access to space. There's no question of that. Between communication and remote sensing, space is critical to India's long term economic development -- and lifting people out of poverty.
The question is whether it is a good investment, when they can rely on the US and Europe -- at least for non-manned access to space. There is is India's tradition of non-alignment to consider. It is attractive not to be dependent on great powers for something so important. Also, expecting an investment in space to pay off in the short term is unreasonable. Twenty years off India might well become a dominant player in the commercialization of space.
But why manned? If people were computers, it would make no sense. But we're not. We have these irrational emotions that have to be played to get the most out of us. There is something exciting about joining the club of "spacefaring nations", more exciting than putting clever little robots in space. I can see Japanese getting inspired by that, but Japanese engineers are an unique breed I think. Once I saw a Japanese engineer give a presentation about the fuzzy logic algorithm he'd used to control the agitator in a washing machine. We're talking that thing that sticks up in the middle of the washing machine and swishes back and forth. It only has one freaking degree of freedom, and this guy was waxing so poetic about it that he was moved to the brink of tears.
Right then and there I resolved never to invest in an American company that made washing machines.
Did you know that after Lincoln worked through Euclid's elements on his own? After his electoral defeat for the House of Representatives, he decided his thinking needed sharpening. Clearly, the USP is the true heir to this man.
Sure, but that doesn't count the percentage of local and state government costs that are tied up in health care. Look at your town budget. There's a good chance that it is in crisis now, and if you look at the part that goes to health care, rolling it back to 1960s level would fix everything.
Same thing with GM going belly up. It was health care.
I'm not saying there's a simple answer. We don't know for sure what might have happened if we went on single payer in 1969 instead of going to the moon.
On the other hand, all the costs we dumped into the Apollo program weren't necessarily for "space exploration". They were just labeled that way. People who were not alive back then might not know that there was a desperate struggle between the US and USSR over world domination. It wasn't just a matter of national prestige (although there was that); it was a matter of gaining a foothold in space and potentially controlling access to space. Had we taken the GGP's program, we might have avoided the health care crisis at the cost of being shut out of space . Access to space is so valuable that it is easy to imagine that the Soviet Union might still exist if it had that kind of advantage.
Hmmm. The thing about the iPod is that the killer features is the integration of iPod/iTunes/iTunes store. The devices are nice of course, but each part of this triangle has significant limitations.
The key is that they all work together to support use cases that consumers find convenient and valuable. That's why "iPod Killers" never kill. You have to get all three pieces, and that is hard especially the store end of things.
Now Amazon nailed it with the Kindle. The Kindle is not the best eBook reader, but Amazon + WhisperNet + Kindle work together better than anything anybody had ever seen before. You can make a better eBook reader, but what you really have to do is to make sure that whole source to use chain has no serious mistakes in it (like not having enough books to sell, having lousy battery life, or having DRM so restrictive it interferes with the primary use of the devices).
So you can't look at this device and say "meh", because it has never been the best device that wins. It's the affordable looking system that offers a convenient solution for something consumers value that wins.
You're going to have to see the whole thing in action to know whether this is "meh" or not. I suspect it may be, but I'm not shorting Apple stock yet.
In 1960, American spent about 5.1% of the GDP on health care. Now it's somewhere around 16% and still rising. That's in relative terms, mind you. Given the growth of GDP, the expenditure increases are simply astounding.
Now total federal spending, after peaking as a percent of GDP in the 1970s, is now roughly where it was in 1962: a bit more than 18%.
So in rough terms, we spend about the same fraction of our generated wealth on all Federal uses as we did in 1960, but more than 3x what we did on health care, so now health care is approximately equal to all Federal expenditures.
If somebody had said in 1962, "We'll take over health care spending, but in fifty years it will double the size of Federal spending relative to the economy," you'd have looked at them like they were nuts. That would clearly hamstring the American economy. But in gross terms it wouldn't have made any difference if we'd gone for that deal, and the strange thing is we seem to accept this state of affairs as normal, even though it continues to get worse. We look around, and wonder why our economy is so sluggish at generating jobs. Now there's lots of reasons of course. In part it's normal for jobs to lag growth in a recovery. But at the same time its worth remembering that the price tag for most of those jobs includes health insurance.
If somebody had said in 1962, "The Federal government will take over health care spending, and it will only increase the share of GDP spent by the government 1.5x," you'd have looked at them like they were nuts. But if you could go back in a time machine and take that deal, it'd look pretty good by today's standards.
But don't join the Democratic party thinking you're going to score. Those Dem babes only date Republican jerks.
It's a Democrat thing, and if you aren't in the party you wouldn't understand. We just can't resist a guy who will cynically screw with us then break our hearts.
Sure, the Republican candidate is usually the one with a blue suit jacket with American Flag pin, white shirt and tie. Often they have the jacket slung over their shoulder and their sleeves rolled up.
The Democratic candidate, of course, is the one with a blue suit jacket with American Flag pin, white shirt and tie. Look for them carrying their jacket slung over their shoulder with their sleeves rolled up.
Then there's hair. Republicans either have naturally good hair, or they overcompensate so much that their hair looks like a mutated doughboy helmet. They never have beards. The Democrats on the other hand either have obviously elaborate and expensive haircuts, although many of them just have naturally good hair. Key point: they're always clean shaven.
Now as to actual policies -- don't get me started on that.
The Churchill quote only demonstrates how clever rhetoric does not an argument make.
I am often amazed at how powerful a beautiful but specious assertion can be. Sometimes it is a compelling analogy that has no actual bearing on the topic at hand. Other times (as in this Churchill case) it is a clever dichotomy that begs the question. This particular quote is a wonderful example of begging the question. It is no more possible to support conservatism with it than it is possible to literally pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
That was an analogy, wasn't it? I hope you didn't find it too beguiling.
There is a Klingon proberb which states: "tlhIngan Hol: Suvlu'taHvIS yapbe' HoS neH" -- Brute strength is not the key asset in a fight.
At 7MPG, the vehicle you suggest is even worse than the HMMWV, which gets 9. The US Military is the single largest user of refined petroleum in the world, and its dependency on these monstrosities is a tactical disadvantage. They're working on a hybrid Hummer that will have twice the gas mileage, higher top speeds, greater acceleration, and an operating range of 380 miles vs. 270 for the conventional version. That may well be the margin of victory for an invading force, which has to worry about supply lines.
You voice my objections to the article better than I could.
That said, what we are talking about is a phenomenon where the abolition of one class of legal abuse tends to lead to another, new class of abuse. As long as there is law and there are people with money interested in subverting the law for their own purposes, you'll have new abuses dreamed up by creative and unscrupulous lawyers.
So this is not a matter of getting the law right, but keeping up with the development of novel abuses.
We needn't resurrect the doctrine of champetry wholesale as it existed a century ago to address the most flagrantly abusive forms of maintenance. The problem with champetry is that it assumes that because contingency fees create an incentive to maintain frivolous lawsuits, that any lawsuit undertaken by a lawyer with a contingency fee is necessarily frivolous. That's only true if we assume that substantive lawsuits are brought exclusively by gentleman of means.
The real problem is not the fee arrangements, but the use of law to obtain plaintiffs privileges beyond what the law grants them. It is the use of the law to undermine the rational basis of the law.
So the point the article makes is better than it appears. Patent trolls use the law to redress injuries that would not exist were it not possible to obtain "relief" through the courts. This is not the case for patent holders who produce actual products using the patents, because infringers take money away from the patent holder's business. Patent trolls have no revenue or prospect of revenue save what they can obtain through lawsuits. Therefore the "injury" they suffer by infringement is a legal fiction.
Slashdot Mirror
Err... Don't you think that's a bit, well, histrionic?
First of all, let's look at baselines and samples and that sort of question. If we administered a test to college freshman in 1910 and compared the results to college freshman of 2010, we'd be mortified if we looked at the percentage that passed some benchmark. But suppose we ask the question "if we took the top N students from each era, what percentage would meet some arbitrary level of proficiency". Now take N to be the number of ALL college freshman in 1910. 2010 would kick 1910's butt, because there are VASTLY more people going to college today.
That's clearly a test obviously slanted toward 2010. But comparing raw percentages is a test obviously slanted toward 1910, and has less rational justification.
Now, let's look as sampling. Suppose we administered the test every year for five years to some institution, and nothing fundamental changes about the world. Would we expect to get 30%, 30%, 30%, 30%, 30%? Of course not. It'd go up and down a few percentage points. It might go something like 30%, 24%, 23%, 29%, 25%, even if nothing had changed.
The fact that the test went from 30% to 25% over the course of several years immediately tells us that the numbers don't reflect a change in the overall population of students. The world does not change quickly enough to produce those kinds of dramatic swings in the population. The difference might well be statistical noise, but we shouldn't ignore *other* kinds of changes, ones not reflecting the state of the entire world. This could be a change at one institution.
If Waterloo wanted to raise the score on its test, it could simply alter its admission standards. Colleges are constantly tweaking their admission standards. This year we want more students with athletics, or performing arts backgrounds. We're switching from formula A to formula B in scoring. We've changed admission committee chairman. All kinds of things happen. That's not counting the fact that Waterloo has *competition* that's trying to take the best students away.
Even if we administered this test to all freshmen everywhere, and knew there was a systemic population decline in the ability to achieve a passing grade, that wouldn't necessarily mean the end is nigh. We'd have to administer a *battery* of tests covering a wide variety of skills. Maybe composing in standard grammar has been deemphasized (obviously a bad thing) and replaced with more education on critical reading (obviously a good thing). We could fix this if we wanted to by deemphasizing critical reading (obviously a bad thing) and emphasizing standard grammar more (obviously a good thing).
What does the test measure anyway? The ability to compose according to one arbitrary standard of what English grammar ought to be. As useful as being able to conform to the standard dialect is for the individual, it's not the only useful skill there is, or even the most useful one to society. I'd be more concerned about declining math ability in the population, provided we could define that reasonably and measure it accurately.
Pardon me, but it strikes me as a bit silly to say we can't supply our energy needs through renewable sources without defining "need".
We don't "need" what the energy companies provide at all. What we need are things produced with that energy.
It would be more sensible to state we can't take an economy based on abundant, cheap, and widely available fossil fuels, suddenly take those fossil fuels away, and expect it not to hurt. Stated that way, why would one expect one or two discrete sources of energy to be a suitable drop-in replacement for oil? The universe doesn't owe us a living on our own terms. Even if we could wave a magic wand and conjure up magic electricity plants that ran on nothing, it wouldn't be as nice (from our perspective) as waving a magic wand and having a boundless supply of oil to supply the systems we have in place today.
Here's an interesting thought experiment. Imagine the world of 1800, where industrial revolution is under way, powered by water driven mills and wind driven ships and animal driven land transport. Imagine that world as just like our own, except there was no oil or coal. It is very likely that if we look at that world in 2010, it is much less wealthy than ours, and as a result less technologically advanced in many areas. But it would not be a world frozen in the technology and economic development levels of 1800.
Peak oil is a big challenge for our society. But it's not one that necessarily means a return to the Stone Age. I think the challenge we face is to continue improving the level of human welfare as oil runs out. New energy sources are important, but they won't be enough. We'll have to be come more efficient per unit of human welfare. The good news is that we're extremely inefficient, so we have lots of room for improvement.
Our current inefficiency is not a moral failing as some would like to paint it. It's the inevitable result of a world with an abundant, cheap, easily available oil. What would be a moral failing is to ignore the challenge of this generation: to find a way to continue improving human welfare as this enormously helpful resource becomes scarce.
Sure -- within limits.
But you can't conjure the know-how and infrastructure to support a manufacturing economy out of thin air -- the industrial engineers who are current with the latest methods; the tool and die companies; the vendor and distributor relationships. Even though have some of the capacity, you can't scale that capacity up by an order of magnitude overnight. If Chinese trade suddenly disappeared, it would be a huge win for some businesses and for manufacturing workers, but it would take many years for other sources of manufacturing capacity to pick up all the slack. And prices would rise, simply from the supply curve shifting. There are places with cheaper labor than China, and places with more sophisticated labor, but no place with the volume of labor at the level of capability China has.
Of course China won't deliberately cut off trade because it can't afford to do it. They have their own problems. One of the things they learned in the Great Leap Forward is that you can't run an economy with grand political gestures. The way you change the average state of affairs is at the margins. Thousands of tiny steps over a decade or more work better than a Great Leap Forward over five years. It's also more stable because your failures as well as your successes are marginal.
There's no telling what a dramatic gesture would do to the successes built up over the last twenty years. China's growth has been as rapid as possible without being out of control, and already they are facing the Microsoft problem: being an enterprise that is dependent on consistent, runaway growth. Anything you are dependent upon is a vulnerability, whether that is guaranteed growth or foreign suppliers.
So the scenario where China deliberately decides to cut us off at the knees is not a credible one in the immediate future, because they'd be hurting themselves more than us. What we have to worry about are things that China might not have control over: war, civil unrest, corruption (both government and private), sloppy accounting and banking practices coming home to roost.
When those things start stressing Chinese politics, that's when you have to worry about the Grand Idiotic Gesture. There's always a few people in every group ready to cut themselves off at the knees to make an impressive political gesture. When things are going reasonably well people simply don't listen to them. But history has shown when faced with imminent disaster, people will readily hand power over to the most confident sounding person, who tends to be a politically cunning idiot. What's more, the idiot's failures initially solidify his hold on power. Things have to get immensely worse and continue worsening for a long time before people admit they made a stupid investment in a bad leader. Look around you, and you'll see that story played out time and time again.
A choice?
Not necessarily a conscious choice.
I took my daughter to the hospital for a test, and admitting gave me clipboard full of papers, with instructions to sign them and initial all the circled places. I looked at the forms, and said, "Where the privacy rights disclosure?"
The person looked at be blankly. "What?" she asked.
"You're asking me to initial where it says I've received the privacy rights disclosure."
"Oh, you just need to initial that."
"May I have one?"
"Sure."
The clerk rooted around and found me one.
Now here's the point of this little parable. The average person's life is full of legal information overload. There is just so much meaningless crap that you have to agree to in order to get through life. I read everything carefully. So does my wife. It's a good idea, but it's also bit like going through life with sand in your gears.
You aren't expected to understand things you agree to. They don't want you to. This stuff is not there for your benefit. It's equally meaningless to the people you are dealing with directly. It's just there to be pulled out of the organization's hat in very, very rare circumstances ("Ha! We have your signature that says you received the disclosure booklet!"). Even then if you have a half-way decent lawyer it won't make any difference ("But it's ten pages of legal gobbledygook, and you can't expect people to go through their lives with a lawyer attached to their hip.")
Increasingly, doing business or even getting basic services like medical treatment involves going through some meaningless (or even worse, semi-meaningful) legal ceremony.
Let me suggest what I believe might be a novel term for this situation: "commitment pollution." "Commitment pollution" is when an average person is so deluged with incomprehensible or patently unenforceable commitments that he can no longer be sure what his rights and responsibilities are.
I believe there is an ethical duty of organizations not to produce commitment pollution, nor to exploit its effects to obtain formal but non-conscious concessions from consumers. For software or devices with software, that means simple understandable licenses and a clear explanation of how the rights the consumer is getting is less than the rights he would naively think.
I am not completely against DRM philosophically, but I think it needs careful regulation. It's dangerous because it gives vendors de facto, extralegal powers over the consumer that the consumer may not be aware of, or in some cases powers which harm society.
For example, when a vendor sells a DRM book reader to the public, does the public know that the vendor can "take back" books that they have purchased? Or that if the company goes out of business or sells its assets to a third party, that consumers could lose all the books they've bought without compensation?
The average person's response to commitment pollution is based on faith that we don't allow unconscionable agreements. But sometimes it's not possible to contain the impact on an unconscionable agreement. When a company goes out of business, there's nobody to hold to account.
That's probably my biggest problem with DRM. If the bulk of knowledge in the hands of the public is in the form of unregulated DRM, that knowledge could disappear when the companies providing the DRM infrastructure go out of business.
Sure it makes us ignorant, but it don't for get: it does it with unprecedented speed and convenience.
The obvious problem with your approach is sometimes people on both extremes of an argument pull their "facts" out of their ass.
The reason Fox is even less useful than most extreme information sources is that it has relatively less information. You can watch it for five minutes and figure out what the message of the day is. The only reason to watch it longer is to have it drilled into your worldview more firmly.
In other words, what we don't want to know can't hurt us...
I'm pretty sure most people who own iPods have never watched a MacWorld keynote, and have only a vague idea of who Steven Jobs is. So it's a mistake to believe Apple survives on its fanboys.
I'm as mystified as you as to why anyone would buy this thing. But my point is that it may not be embodied in the device at all. We'll have to see the services and apps that are built for the thing, and that might not come out right at the launch either. That would be characteristic. They staged the introduction of iPhone/touch features more slowly than they might have.
I understand. I happen to hate the iTunes store. I much prefer Amazon's MP3 download service. It meets my needs. I don't much care for the way iTunes wants to steer me to the latest episode of popular TV shows. I have no interest in that, and I always feel like I'm fighting the software to get it to do what I want.
But one thing I've learned after decades in this business is that you can't design products around your own preferences. I've seen that approach fail time and time again. I've even seen the same guys make the same mistake more than once.
It doesn't matter that I hate the iTunes store. Steve Jobs would be an idiot to design products that cater to people like me, because we're lousy, cranky, critical customers and cheapskates besides.
Bam!
OK, score one for you. But... have you ever tried actually living with a woman?
Really? It makes me want to never invest in a Japanese company that makes washing machines. It's a frelling agitator for crying out loud. Why does it need fuzzy logic at all?
I couldn't begin to do justice to this guy's passion for his work, but of course it's nuts to care that much about how to swish clothes more effectively. But the thing about mass produced goods is that what matters is marginal costs. Good design is the feature with the cheapest marginal cost of all. Maybe the computer control went in because it simplified the control system and made the thing cheaper to make, but once you'd done that it doesn't really cost any more to see if you can make it a tiny bit better.
In any case, I just don't believe in betting for the company whose employees are going through the motions asleep out of bed and against the company that has people who love their work.
Well, how about
"We choose not to go to the moon because not enough of the voters care enough about doing that to have their taxes raised or to give up enough other stuff to pay for a credible effort."
?
That's not exactly thrilling rhetoric, but its hard to argue with.
A really, really good unmanned probe would cost less than a half-assed attempt to put a man any place in the solar system other than Earth. I'd even argue that the people who desperately want to see progress towards human space colonization would be better off backing a series of successful, cheap unmanned missions than going through the motions of planning a manned mission without the money to do it succesfully.
There are only two compelling reasons to back manned space exploration in the short term, in my opinion. One is to further our study of the human body's ability to participate in larger, more ambitious planned missions in the future. This pretty much amounts to keeping our manned options open. The second is a fire in our national belly to see an American standing on the Moon, or Mars.
If you want Americans to pony up for that, you've got to (a) convince us our national prestige is on the line and (b) convince us to care about that. I don't think Americans care that much about national prestige any longer. We don't have anything against it, but from what I can see, the notion of actually sacrificing anything for that purpose is repugnant to most of us.
So, what's the plan for escaping the heat death of the universe?
There isn't one?
Why should I care about that any less than the Sun transforming into an M class star and stripping the atmosphere off the Earth.
Wait, we don't have a plan for that either...
Maybe the answer is that space exploration is worth doing for the current or next generation.
A little bit of perspective is called for here.
Yes, vast numbers of people living in crushing poverty are a drain on the Indian economy and a potentially destabilizing influence on its government. But India is huge, period. There are more people living in middle class conditions in India than there are Americans total.
Well, India is an economy that needs access to space. There's no question of that. Between communication and remote sensing, space is critical to India's long term economic development -- and lifting people out of poverty.
The question is whether it is a good investment, when they can rely on the US and Europe -- at least for non-manned access to space. There is is India's tradition of non-alignment to consider. It is attractive not to be dependent on great powers for something so important. Also, expecting an investment in space to pay off in the short term is unreasonable. Twenty years off India might well become a dominant player in the commercialization of space.
But why manned? If people were computers, it would make no sense. But we're not. We have these irrational emotions that have to be played to get the most out of us. There is something exciting about joining the club of "spacefaring nations", more exciting than putting clever little robots in space. I can see Japanese getting inspired by that, but Japanese engineers are an unique breed I think. Once I saw a Japanese engineer give a presentation about the fuzzy logic algorithm he'd used to control the agitator in a washing machine. We're talking that thing that sticks up in the middle of the washing machine and swishes back and forth. It only has one freaking degree of freedom, and this guy was waxing so poetic about it that he was moved to the brink of tears.
Right then and there I resolved never to invest in an American company that made washing machines.
That's why I support the Unix Sysadmin Party.
Did you know that after Lincoln worked through Euclid's elements on his own? After his electoral defeat for the House of Representatives, he decided his thinking needed sharpening. Clearly, the USP is the true heir to this man.
Sure, but that doesn't count the percentage of local and state government costs that are tied up in health care. Look at your town budget. There's a good chance that it is in crisis now, and if you look at the part that goes to health care, rolling it back to 1960s level would fix everything.
Same thing with GM going belly up. It was health care.
I'm not saying there's a simple answer. We don't know for sure what might have happened if we went on single payer in 1969 instead of going to the moon.
On the other hand, all the costs we dumped into the Apollo program weren't necessarily for "space exploration". They were just labeled that way. People who were not alive back then might not know that there was a desperate struggle between the US and USSR over world domination. It wasn't just a matter of national prestige (although there was that); it was a matter of gaining a foothold in space and potentially controlling access to space. Had we taken the GGP's program, we might have avoided the health care crisis at the cost of being shut out of space . Access to space is so valuable that it is easy to imagine that the Soviet Union might still exist if it had that kind of advantage.
Hmmm. The thing about the iPod is that the killer features is the integration of iPod/iTunes/iTunes store. The devices are nice of course, but each part of this triangle has significant limitations.
The key is that they all work together to support use cases that consumers find convenient and valuable. That's why "iPod Killers" never kill. You have to get all three pieces, and that is hard especially the store end of things.
Now Amazon nailed it with the Kindle. The Kindle is not the best eBook reader, but Amazon + WhisperNet + Kindle work together better than anything anybody had ever seen before. You can make a better eBook reader, but what you really have to do is to make sure that whole source to use chain has no serious mistakes in it (like not having enough books to sell, having lousy battery life, or having DRM so restrictive it interferes with the primary use of the devices).
So you can't look at this device and say "meh", because it has never been the best device that wins. It's the affordable looking system that offers a convenient solution for something consumers value that wins.
You're going to have to see the whole thing in action to know whether this is "meh" or not. I suspect it may be, but I'm not shorting Apple stock yet.
Except that wasn't so clear in the 1960s.
In 1960, American spent about 5.1% of the GDP on health care. Now it's somewhere around 16% and still rising. That's in relative terms, mind you. Given the growth of GDP, the expenditure increases are simply astounding.
Now total federal spending, after peaking as a percent of GDP in the 1970s, is now roughly where it was in 1962: a bit more than 18%.
So in rough terms, we spend about the same fraction of our generated wealth on all Federal uses as we did in 1960, but more than 3x what we did on health care, so now health care is approximately equal to all Federal expenditures.
If somebody had said in 1962, "We'll take over health care spending, but in fifty years it will double the size of Federal spending relative to the economy," you'd have looked at them like they were nuts. That would clearly hamstring the American economy. But in gross terms it wouldn't have made any difference if we'd gone for that deal, and the strange thing is we seem to accept this state of affairs as normal, even though it continues to get worse. We look around, and wonder why our economy is so sluggish at generating jobs. Now there's lots of reasons of course. In part it's normal for jobs to lag growth in a recovery. But at the same time its worth remembering that the price tag for most of those jobs includes health insurance.
If somebody had said in 1962, "The Federal government will take over health care spending, and it will only increase the share of GDP spent by the government 1.5x," you'd have looked at them like they were nuts. But if you could go back in a time machine and take that deal, it'd look pretty good by today's standards.
I see you belong to the Humpty Dumpty school of lexicography.
But don't join the Democratic party thinking you're going to score. Those Dem babes only date Republican jerks.
It's a Democrat thing, and if you aren't in the party you wouldn't understand. We just can't resist a guy who will cynically screw with us then break our hearts.
Sure, the Republican candidate is usually the one with a blue suit jacket with American Flag pin, white shirt and tie. Often they have the jacket slung over their shoulder and their sleeves rolled up.
The Democratic candidate, of course, is the one with a blue suit jacket with American Flag pin, white shirt and tie. Look for them carrying their jacket slung over their shoulder with their sleeves rolled up.
Then there's hair. Republicans either have naturally good hair, or they overcompensate so much that their hair looks like a mutated doughboy helmet. They never have beards. The Democrats on the other hand either have obviously elaborate and expensive haircuts, although many of them just have naturally good hair. Key point: they're always clean shaven.
Now as to actual policies -- don't get me started on that.
The Churchill quote only demonstrates how clever rhetoric does not an argument make.
I am often amazed at how powerful a beautiful but specious assertion can be. Sometimes it is a compelling analogy that has no actual bearing on the topic at hand. Other times (as in this Churchill case) it is a clever dichotomy that begs the question. This particular quote is a wonderful example of begging the question. It is no more possible to support conservatism with it than it is possible to literally pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
That was an analogy, wasn't it? I hope you didn't find it too beguiling.
There is a Klingon proberb which states: "tlhIngan Hol: Suvlu'taHvIS yapbe' HoS neH" -- Brute strength is not the key asset in a fight.
At 7MPG, the vehicle you suggest is even worse than the HMMWV, which gets 9. The US Military is the single largest user of refined petroleum in the world, and its dependency on these monstrosities is a tactical disadvantage. They're working on a hybrid Hummer that will have twice the gas mileage, higher top speeds, greater acceleration, and an operating range of 380 miles vs. 270 for the conventional version. That may well be the margin of victory for an invading force, which has to worry about supply lines.
The lambo is definitely a poseur vehicle.
You voice my objections to the article better than I could.
That said, what we are talking about is a phenomenon where the abolition of one class of legal abuse tends to lead to another, new class of abuse. As long as there is law and there are people with money interested in subverting the law for their own purposes, you'll have new abuses dreamed up by creative and unscrupulous lawyers.
So this is not a matter of getting the law right, but keeping up with the development of novel abuses.
We needn't resurrect the doctrine of champetry wholesale as it existed a century ago to address the most flagrantly abusive forms of maintenance. The problem with champetry is that it assumes that because contingency fees create an incentive to maintain frivolous lawsuits, that any lawsuit undertaken by a lawyer with a contingency fee is necessarily frivolous. That's only true if we assume that substantive lawsuits are brought exclusively by gentleman of means.
The real problem is not the fee arrangements, but the use of law to obtain plaintiffs privileges beyond what the law grants them. It is the use of the law to undermine the rational basis of the law.
So the point the article makes is better than it appears. Patent trolls use the law to redress injuries that would not exist were it not possible to obtain "relief" through the courts. This is not the case for patent holders who produce actual products using the patents, because infringers take money away from the patent holder's business. Patent trolls have no revenue or prospect of revenue save what they can obtain through lawsuits. Therefore the "injury" they suffer by infringement is a legal fiction.