Take a temporal trip. The average family enjoyed a better standard of living in 1970 than in 2008, even though the average family income, adjusted for inflation, was lower. There was more likely a stay at home parent, and the amount of non-disposable income (that is, income not spent on "necessities" - health care, mortgage, daycare for kids, education, car, etc. - was much less than today. Today, two incomes are required for many families to enjoy a middle class lifestyle. This may sound like an OK thing at first, but once you start reasoning through the implications - higher chance for loss of income, less family time, etc., it is clear that today's middle class families are far less secure than those a generation ago.
We spend nearly 10% of our yearly national budget on servicing this debt. That is insane and is following the trends of the average consumer. In 1981, the average US family spend 4% of their income on credit card debt; in 2001 it was 12%. And look how fucked the average consumer is in 2001 vs. 1981 - six times as many bankruptcies. We are headed down the path of national bankruptcy. For reals.
Freighteningly, $10,000,000,000,000 does not even come close to covering the expected costs of SS, Medicare, Medicaid,...
Sure, it may not cover the expected costs if we continue with the benefits promised today, it will work out just fine if we drastically cut benefits. Just wait until the baby boomers die out in large enough numbers so that their voting bloc is not longer so powerful. Then we will see substantive cuts to entitlement programs.
Seeing as we bought $25 BILLION more from China than China bought from the US just in August 2008, I'd say that we are a pretty integral customer of Chinese manufacturing.
Check out the stats: http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html. We've already bought more than $167 billion of Chinese goods than we have sold the Chinese. That is not an insignificant number, and that figure only takes into account the first 3/4ths of the year.
Yes, it is unfair (and essentially amoral) for a TV station to give airtime to one candidate and not another.
How do you figure? I would think a privately owned television station would have it's own rights to blather on about whatever opponents it so chooses. E.g., Air America radio gives props to Democratic candidates, Fox talk radio to Republicans. Are these stations, radio personalities, managers, and stockholders acting amorally?
If it is amoral, why? Because they are a major media outlet? What if it's a less popular station? What if it's a blog? What if it's one guy standing on the street corner?
How about you stop trying to tell me I'm telling people what they can and cannot do? I said it was amoral. Did I say it should be illegal? Did I even tell anyone to not do it?
Fair enough. Although to be pedantic, I never told YOU to stop telling people what to do. I said: "How about we try to stop telling people what they can and cannot do..."
I never said fund raising doesn't have an effect on elections. But please don't equate a causation between fundraising and election success. Sure, there may be a correlation, but a candidate is elected strictly on the number of votes she receives from her constituents.
It is amoral for a person in Silicon Valley to illegally vote in an election in Alabama. But I fail to see the amorality in contributing to a campaign.
Here's an analogy: the more (positive) air time a candidate gets on television, radio, the Internet, etc. the more likely she is to win. Therefore it is amoral for a national broadcaster to give air time to a candidate in a local election without giving equal airtime to their candidate. Or it's amoral for a non-Kansan to come to/. and submit this piece about a Kansas candidate, and it's even more amoral for the/. crew to publish it.
How about we try to stop telling people what they can and cannot do so long as their actions don't step on the fundamental rights of another human being. Donating money to a candidate in a local election is not squashing anyone's unalienable rights.
Let me put it this way, me and my buddies here in Silicon Valley could easy drop many thousands (hundreds of thousands if we do it as a group) on political races in Alabama, selecting candidates that represent our views, trying to make behave the way we want (pro-choice, etc.)
But that wouldn't be right. Everyone is entitled to select representatives that represent them, and not those who live thousands of miles away.
Last time I checked candidates were elected based on the number of votes they received, not by the size of their campaign war chest. I don't see what's wrong with external and outside fund-raising. if money is all it takes for a populace to vote in a candidate that doesn't represent their interests, then they deserve the level of representation and service they receive in such a case.
I didn't mean to imply that Microsoft disregarded backwards compatibility with Vista altogether, but rather that their commitment to backwards compatibility went from "insane" to just "sane.":-)
Please read this article: DOS Ain't Done Till Lotus Won't Run. It does a good job of debunking this myth. So does common sense. Why would Microsoft make an OS where a product used by the lion's share of users won't run anymore?
In fact, until the Vista release, Microsoft has had an insane commitment toward backwards compatibility. Read some of the horror stories from Raymond Chen's blog. You'll hear about how the core Windows 95 code was modified so that a bug in SimCity could be side-stepped. You'll read about how Excel developers purposefully added buggy behavior to Excel so that it would make the same mistakes as Lotus 1-2-3!
Granted, today Microsoft appears to be less in tune with this mantra of backwards compatibility. Joel Spolsky has a passionate diatribe on this matter: How Microsoft Lost the API War. Personally, I think that Microsoft is going to be just fine long term. They make great developer products, have a huge install base, tons of cash in the bank, and some very smart people at key positions in the company.
Um, I believe they do offer a dividend. I'm no financial wiz, but according to Google Finance the dividend is 0.11. To be honest I don't know if that means 11 cents or 11%. But I assume it means some kind of dividend is paid out per share owned.
Thank you. I started investigating the housing issues facing us back in 2005 when my wife and I were considering moving up in home. Needless to say, we were floored by the price increases in our city since we bought our first home in 2001.
Two great places for reading up on and discussing housing, mortgage, and credit related issues are:
I've never sold a house, but I have purchased one. And from what I remember there were many forms and processes: house inspections, termite inspections, title insurance, setting up an escrow account, walk throughs, and more. As a first time home buyer or seller, I imagine the deluge of paperwork can be intimidating. You might worry that you're forgetting a critical document. Perhaps it's not such a big deal if the buyer has an agent/Realtor, but if both of you are first timers and both are trying to do this sans real estate professional, there is the potential for disaster. Perhaps a real estate attorney could be helpful here and end up costing less than 6%.
Sure, housing prices fell drastically, but as the AC pointed out, "I don't think 'rock bottom' means what you think it means." By stating that housing prices are at "rock bottom" you are saying that they will not go any lower in price. But housing prices are still grotesquely overvalued in most markets and still have a long way to go down before we see any kind of bottom. And even when that bottom is hit, chances are the prices will remain stagnant for many years, which translates to a continued real decline when accounting for inflation.
Housing costs, in aggregate, historically increase just a nudge over inflation. Yet we saw national median prices increasing at 20% per annum over the past several years, and 50%-100% in bubbly areas (San Diego, Miami, San Francisco, Las Vegas, etc.). Personally, I'd wager that we won't hit a national rock bottom - and by that I mean prices showing steady and "normal" increases of a nudge above inflation consistently for a one year period - for at least another five years, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's closer to ten years.
I was an intern at Microsoft back in the last millenia and had my own private office half the summer, with a door and a 24" monitor. The other half of the summer I shared that office with another employee.
I've been to the Redmond campus a half dozen times since then, and the place is still one of the most appealing work environments I've ever seen.
As far as my beliefs about God are concerned the same applies. What I believe will be some approximation to the truth. How good an approximation remains to be seen.
But how to you evaluate the "universal truthiness" of something without repeatable observations that everyone can evaluate? How can you make any assumption that God exists is any more approximate a truth than we are just figments of the imagination of a steel worker in Ohio named Bruce in the year 1967? I am unable to discern how one viewpoint on reality can be judged more approximate to the truth than the other. Neither can be deemed truthful, because neither can be tested. That's not to say that neither are true - yes, we may be mere bit part actors in Bruce's dream - but it is to say that neither can be proven true.
In short, you cannot prove the existence of God in a manner that is scientifically sound. Because of this, I view religious beliefs to be strictly a personal matter. If you want to believe in the God as told in the Bible, go for it. If you want to believe in the ever-powerful steel worker Bruce, be my guest. Where I do have a problem is when a group of believers attempts to force their views on others. (I'm not claiming that you are doing this, just stating that there are plenty of people in the past and present who have tried to force their faith on others.)
That's precisely why those who demand a scientific, or repeatable (press this button, watch the evidence pop out just here), type of proof of the existance of God are always going to be disappointed, regardless of the truth or otherwise of the hypothesis 'God exists'.
But how does one divine the "truth" of a statement without a repeatable hypothesis? If the "truth" cannot be tested, then it is "faith," not "truth," by definition. I, for one, am not calling you an idiot or spitting on your faith (as I think some atheists are foolishly apt to do). I respect that you may personally believe in a certain God and hold that to be your own personal "truth," but if you think that it is a universal truth then, I think, you have a very ego-centric viewpoint of things. By declaring your faith universally true, you are essentially saying that others' beliefs - which were possibly formed in the exact same manner as yours - are untrue.
This is why the scientific method is so powerful, because it allows for hypotheses to be formed and tested by everyone and net the same results by everyone. Consequently, it defines universal truth (for the things that it can be applied to).
The problem is that the believers DO have some evidence: they have observed that whatever they believe in works (in some sense, often the way that it works is that it adds some sort of meaning to their life or puts them at ease in some way).
The whole basis of the scientific method is that the "observations" used to lend strength to a hypothesis are repeatable. If one person sees the Flying Spaghetti Monster on top of a mountain, but can never summon Him for others to observe, then that observation is worthless.
Although calling anyone an idiot is not a good way to start a discussion (especially one centering on faith).
Heh, this is fun. We two professionals debating about a completely non-professional scenario.
I wonder if you see this so much in other professions. Where but in computer science is there such emphasis on war-story swapping and anecdotal experiences?
Granted, if the poster is entirely green, then there's no point in trying. Any complete business solution, of any size, is going to have design, development, and deployment difficulties -- heh, I think I'll write that down somewhere.
I'm assuming that the poster is a moderately experienced programmer -- perhaps never having engaged a business solution, but capable of stringing together a solution with a little spit and a lot of love. The kind of thing that over time can be improved and matured as his knowledge ad experience does the same.
I have a hard time seeing this poster as an experienced programmer. I hate to sound crass, but why would you work in a comic book store if you are an experienced programmer? It's kind of like saying, "I betcha that guy cooking the pizza has experience with business accounting," because he offered to install Turbo Tax on his manager's computer for him.
All that said, damn I wish I had the time to do a little back-office upgrading of my own systems. But hey, when given the choice between programming for direct profit and programming for back-office improvement, you can guess which one takes priority. I've actually started giving some clients a discount if they give me twice the calendar time so I can use their project as an excuse to build a few features that I can reuse in my own systems.
What do you / your business do? My wife and I work as independent "consultants" (i.e., developers) for mostly small companies, usually off site (i.e., from home). I also write and do training in my field.
Then you don't run a business. It's that simple. My business is never broke, and it never needs fixing. But it's always growing. Status quo is terrible.
I do run a business, and I have worked with many small businesses designing solutions like this. And I have enough experience to know that while the status quo may not mean a growing business, it is preferred over spending time and money in an area where the benefits do not outweigh the costs.
I do not know this business, nor do I know the employee, so everything I say is conjecture, but in my mind I am picturing a small, one-man business with a few hourly employees. The person doing the work is, in my mind, a hobbyist who does not have much (if any) background or experience in designing a system like this. I could be horribly mistaken. This could be a 50-store comic store chain. The employee may have been a super star software architect who's built dozens of real-world applications in the real world. But my advice is based on these assumptions. Clearly they are incorrect if the assumptions are.
Given these assumptions - a small, one man shop and a hobbyist employee with limited experience - you, if in this position, would revamp your most important system (collecting payment!)?
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It is surprising seeing how much money and privilege he's enjoyed from the bosom of this country.
Take a temporal trip. The average family enjoyed a better standard of living in 1970 than in 2008, even though the average family income, adjusted for inflation, was lower. There was more likely a stay at home parent, and the amount of non-disposable income (that is, income not spent on "necessities" - health care, mortgage, daycare for kids, education, car, etc. - was much less than today. Today, two incomes are required for many families to enjoy a middle class lifestyle. This may sound like an OK thing at first, but once you start reasoning through the implications - higher chance for loss of income, less family time, etc., it is clear that today's middle class families are far less secure than those a generation ago.
We spend nearly 10% of our yearly national budget on servicing this debt. That is insane and is following the trends of the average consumer. In 1981, the average US family spend 4% of their income on credit card debt; in 2001 it was 12%. And look how fucked the average consumer is in 2001 vs. 1981 - six times as many bankruptcies. We are headed down the path of national bankruptcy. For reals.
Freighteningly, $10,000,000,000,000 does not even come close to covering the expected costs of SS, Medicare, Medicaid, ...
Sure, it may not cover the expected costs if we continue with the benefits promised today, it will work out just fine if we drastically cut benefits. Just wait until the baby boomers die out in large enough numbers so that their voting bloc is not longer so powerful. Then we will see substantive cuts to entitlement programs.
Seeing as we bought $25 BILLION more from China than China bought from the US just in August 2008, I'd say that we are a pretty integral customer of Chinese manufacturing.
Check out the stats: http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html. We've already bought more than $167 billion of Chinese goods than we have sold the Chinese. That is not an insignificant number, and that figure only takes into account the first 3/4ths of the year.
When you owe the bank $10,000, you've got a problem. When you owe the bank $10,000,000, the bank has a problem.>/i>
I think China and other creditor nations have a bigger problem than we do at this point.
Yes, it is unfair (and essentially amoral) for a TV station to give airtime to one candidate and not another.
How do you figure? I would think a privately owned television station would have it's own rights to blather on about whatever opponents it so chooses. E.g., Air America radio gives props to Democratic candidates, Fox talk radio to Republicans. Are these stations, radio personalities, managers, and stockholders acting amorally?
If it is amoral, why? Because they are a major media outlet? What if it's a less popular station? What if it's a blog? What if it's one guy standing on the street corner?
How about you stop trying to tell me I'm telling people what they can and cannot do? I said it was amoral. Did I say it should be illegal? Did I even tell anyone to not do it?
Fair enough. Although to be pedantic, I never told YOU to stop telling people what to do. I said: "How about we try to stop telling people what they can and cannot do..."
I never said fund raising doesn't have an effect on elections. But please don't equate a causation between fundraising and election success. Sure, there may be a correlation, but a candidate is elected strictly on the number of votes she receives from her constituents.
It is amoral for a person in Silicon Valley to illegally vote in an election in Alabama. But I fail to see the amorality in contributing to a campaign.
Here's an analogy: the more (positive) air time a candidate gets on television, radio, the Internet, etc. the more likely she is to win. Therefore it is amoral for a national broadcaster to give air time to a candidate in a local election without giving equal airtime to their candidate. Or it's amoral for a non-Kansan to come to /. and submit this piece about a Kansas candidate, and it's even more amoral for the /. crew to publish it.
How about we try to stop telling people what they can and cannot do so long as their actions don't step on the fundamental rights of another human being. Donating money to a candidate in a local election is not squashing anyone's unalienable rights.
Let me put it this way, me and my buddies here in Silicon Valley could easy drop many thousands (hundreds of thousands if we do it as a group) on political races in Alabama, selecting candidates that represent our views, trying to make behave the way we want (pro-choice, etc.) But that wouldn't be right. Everyone is entitled to select representatives that represent them, and not those who live thousands of miles away.
Last time I checked candidates were elected based on the number of votes they received, not by the size of their campaign war chest. I don't see what's wrong with external and outside fund-raising. if money is all it takes for a populace to vote in a candidate that doesn't represent their interests, then they deserve the level of representation and service they receive in such a case.
Duh. Stick figures were invented by Sam Brown.
A metaphor is as confusing as a simile.
I didn't mean to imply that Microsoft disregarded backwards compatibility with Vista altogether, but rather that their commitment to backwards compatibility went from "insane" to just "sane." :-)
Please read this article: DOS Ain't Done Till Lotus Won't Run. It does a good job of debunking this myth. So does common sense. Why would Microsoft make an OS where a product used by the lion's share of users won't run anymore?
In fact, until the Vista release, Microsoft has had an insane commitment toward backwards compatibility. Read some of the horror stories from Raymond Chen's blog. You'll hear about how the core Windows 95 code was modified so that a bug in SimCity could be side-stepped. You'll read about how Excel developers purposefully added buggy behavior to Excel so that it would make the same mistakes as Lotus 1-2-3!
Granted, today Microsoft appears to be less in tune with this mantra of backwards compatibility. Joel Spolsky has a passionate diatribe on this matter: How Microsoft Lost the API War. Personally, I think that Microsoft is going to be just fine long term. They make great developer products, have a huge install base, tons of cash in the bank, and some very smart people at key positions in the company.
Um, I believe they do offer a dividend. I'm no financial wiz, but according to Google Finance the dividend is 0.11. To be honest I don't know if that means 11 cents or 11%. But I assume it means some kind of dividend is paid out per share owned.
Thank you. I started investigating the housing issues facing us back in 2005 when my wife and I were considering moving up in home. Needless to say, we were floored by the price increases in our city since we bought our first home in 2001.
Two great places for reading up on and discussing housing, mortgage, and credit related issues are:
I've never sold a house, but I have purchased one. And from what I remember there were many forms and processes: house inspections, termite inspections, title insurance, setting up an escrow account, walk throughs, and more. As a first time home buyer or seller, I imagine the deluge of paperwork can be intimidating. You might worry that you're forgetting a critical document. Perhaps it's not such a big deal if the buyer has an agent/Realtor, but if both of you are first timers and both are trying to do this sans real estate professional, there is the potential for disaster. Perhaps a real estate attorney could be helpful here and end up costing less than 6%.
Sure, housing prices fell drastically, but as the AC pointed out, "I don't think 'rock bottom' means what you think it means." By stating that housing prices are at "rock bottom" you are saying that they will not go any lower in price. But housing prices are still grotesquely overvalued in most markets and still have a long way to go down before we see any kind of bottom. And even when that bottom is hit, chances are the prices will remain stagnant for many years, which translates to a continued real decline when accounting for inflation.
Housing costs, in aggregate, historically increase just a nudge over inflation. Yet we saw national median prices increasing at 20% per annum over the past several years, and 50%-100% in bubbly areas (San Diego, Miami, San Francisco, Las Vegas, etc.). Personally, I'd wager that we won't hit a national rock bottom - and by that I mean prices showing steady and "normal" increases of a nudge above inflation consistently for a one year period - for at least another five years, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's closer to ten years.
I was an intern at Microsoft back in the last millenia and had my own private office half the summer, with a door and a 24" monitor. The other half of the summer I shared that office with another employee.
I've been to the Redmond campus a half dozen times since then, and the place is still one of the most appealing work environments I've ever seen.
Which is why the scientific method is worthless for a large class of interesting problems.
Agreed. That is why there will always be interesting problems that will never be solved. As Goedel showed, that's just par for the course.
You could replace the word "God" with "Bruce the steel worker" and the verifiability of this claim would be no different.
But how to you evaluate the "universal truthiness" of something without repeatable observations that everyone can evaluate? How can you make any assumption that God exists is any more approximate a truth than we are just figments of the imagination of a steel worker in Ohio named Bruce in the year 1967? I am unable to discern how one viewpoint on reality can be judged more approximate to the truth than the other. Neither can be deemed truthful, because neither can be tested. That's not to say that neither are true - yes, we may be mere bit part actors in Bruce's dream - but it is to say that neither can be proven true.
In short, you cannot prove the existence of God in a manner that is scientifically sound. Because of this, I view religious beliefs to be strictly a personal matter. If you want to believe in the God as told in the Bible, go for it. If you want to believe in the ever-powerful steel worker Bruce, be my guest. Where I do have a problem is when a group of believers attempts to force their views on others. (I'm not claiming that you are doing this, just stating that there are plenty of people in the past and present who have tried to force their faith on others.)
But how does one divine the "truth" of a statement without a repeatable hypothesis? If the "truth" cannot be tested, then it is "faith," not "truth," by definition. I, for one, am not calling you an idiot or spitting on your faith (as I think some atheists are foolishly apt to do). I respect that you may personally believe in a certain God and hold that to be your own personal "truth," but if you think that it is a universal truth then, I think, you have a very ego-centric viewpoint of things. By declaring your faith universally true, you are essentially saying that others' beliefs - which were possibly formed in the exact same manner as yours - are untrue.
This is why the scientific method is so powerful, because it allows for hypotheses to be formed and tested by everyone and net the same results by everyone. Consequently, it defines universal truth (for the things that it can be applied to).
The whole basis of the scientific method is that the "observations" used to lend strength to a hypothesis are repeatable. If one person sees the Flying Spaghetti Monster on top of a mountain, but can never summon Him for others to observe, then that observation is worthless.
Although calling anyone an idiot is not a good way to start a discussion (especially one centering on faith).
I wonder if you see this so much in other professions. Where but in computer science is there such emphasis on war-story swapping and anecdotal experiences?
Granted, if the poster is entirely green, then there's no point in trying. Any complete business solution, of any size, is going to have design, development, and deployment difficulties -- heh, I think I'll write that down somewhere. I'm assuming that the poster is a moderately experienced programmer -- perhaps never having engaged a business solution, but capable of stringing together a solution with a little spit and a lot of love. The kind of thing that over time can be improved and matured as his knowledge ad experience does the same.I have a hard time seeing this poster as an experienced programmer. I hate to sound crass, but why would you work in a comic book store if you are an experienced programmer? It's kind of like saying, "I betcha that guy cooking the pizza has experience with business accounting," because he offered to install Turbo Tax on his manager's computer for him.
All that said, damn I wish I had the time to do a little back-office upgrading of my own systems. But hey, when given the choice between programming for direct profit and programming for back-office improvement, you can guess which one takes priority. I've actually started giving some clients a discount if they give me twice the calendar time so I can use their project as an excuse to build a few features that I can reuse in my own systems.What do you / your business do? My wife and I work as independent "consultants" (i.e., developers) for mostly small companies, usually off site (i.e., from home). I also write and do training in my field.
I do run a business, and I have worked with many small businesses designing solutions like this. And I have enough experience to know that while the status quo may not mean a growing business, it is preferred over spending time and money in an area where the benefits do not outweigh the costs.
I do not know this business, nor do I know the employee, so everything I say is conjecture, but in my mind I am picturing a small, one-man business with a few hourly employees. The person doing the work is, in my mind, a hobbyist who does not have much (if any) background or experience in designing a system like this. I could be horribly mistaken. This could be a 50-store comic store chain. The employee may have been a super star software architect who's built dozens of real-world applications in the real world. But my advice is based on these assumptions. Clearly they are incorrect if the assumptions are.
Given these assumptions - a small, one man shop and a hobbyist employee with limited experience - you, if in this position, would revamp your most important system (collecting payment!)?