There's a Big Lever in D.C. It has two positions: 'invest' and 'consume'. The Big Lever is connected to a lot of things, but the tax code is a major one. "Profit" and "income" are separate concepts in the tax code, even though this is obviously nonsense. In the tax 'code', "profit" means "investment"; and "income" means "consumption". They have different definitions and different tax rates so that they can be connected to different ends of the Big Lever.
Regardless of the party in charge, the Big Lever is operated with one overriding goal: centralize control of everything. Maintain the status quo. Maximize profit at big corporations. Maximize individual consumption. Make as many people dependent on government and big business as possible. Depending on the state of the economy, the Big Lever is put into whichever position will effectuate this goal.
For instance, when productivity is rising or new technologies are being invented, the Big Lever is thrown into the "consume" position, in order to prevent them. Or, at least, in order to steer that productive effort into less disruptive, pointless consumerism. It might seem rational for individuals to want to invest in new technologies or to benefit from productivity gains. But this goes against the overriding goal of maintaining a centralized economy and a dependent populace. So the Big Lever is used to discourage individuals from making individually rational decisions that could upset the status quo. Talking heads on television spout doublethink nonsense like "macroeconomics is counter-intuitive" and "it's bad when everyone saves" in order to convince people that dependence and consumption are good even when they're obviously not.
Normally, when something bad like a natural disaster or national tragedy happens, what's the rational reaction? Stop consuming as much, start investing more? Arrange your assets to become a bit more independent, and more resilient to future disasters? But that means less centralization. So investment is bad in this instance. It upsets the status quo. It's not efficient. It cuts into corporate profits. It reduces the size of government. Government has a better plan that doesn't upset the status quo. They put the Big Lever in the 'consume' position. When a natural tragedy happens, they just cull the flock. Send some of them off to war. That keeps production up! It's good for the economy!
But when the economy is really doing poorly, when inflation is rising, when there's nothing left to consume, when people might want to take advantage of that "social safety net" they've been paying taxes for, that's when it's time to throw the lever into the 'invest' position. That's when we see the talking heads telling us to "roll up our sleeves" and "sacrifice". That's when it's time to cut benefits and wages and workers. Because that's the time when the workers have absolutely no other choice. They have become completely dependent on over-consumption and big business and big government. They were told to consume when they should have invested. Now they have no choice but to invest.
So when terrorists crash planes into buildings, just keep calm and carry on consuming. But when the American central bank crashes the economy building unnecessary houses and shopping malls, that's when you have to invest in bailing them out.
You see, the problem isn't that you're being fleeced. The problem is that you might escape.
Water has a pretty high thermal mass so I don't think variable temperatures are anything to worry about. Biocontamination can be dealt with fairly easily, by sequestration and redundancy. Waste product removal is a halfway interesting problem, but I'd bet Kevin Costner is working on it as we speak.
Somehow I don't think the idea of offshore nuclear reactors is all that unique, and certainly not "stolen from the Russians", seeing as how I have drawings of them here in a book from the 70s.
Putting it out of sight removes one more thing for the luddites to complain about. Putting it in the ocean is an obvious choice for cooling and for proximity to most of the world's population centers. And the steel used is probably cheaper than the concrete required on land; you can't crash a plane into a reactor under the ocean.
Okay I replaced all of my lightbulbs and bought some black-rimmed glasses now I'm riding my bicycle and I added a link to my blog to raise awareness. Is there some way that phonebanking can help?
But time isn't money. That's a two-hundred year old maxim based on the marxian labor theory of value which should have been thoroughly discredited by now.
Thermodynamic order is money. So money is more proportional to something like temperature * time.
And 'temperature' in the information processing sense basically means the rate of data normalization, which is dependent upon all sorts of things, some of which are inversely proportional to time.
Lately I've been thinking about a system of on-demand buses that could negotiate with passengers to take them directly from one place to another with minimal inconvenience. One of the major disadvantages (needless in my opinion) of bus systems is the fact that they have fixed stops and fixed schedules. Going anywhere requires walking to a nearby stop, waiting around for a bus to show up, waiting while the bus stops every mile or so along the route, and then walking to your final destination. It could take two hours to go across town.
I'm thinking of something like a shuttle service that could be tied into an iPhone app. You could enter in your origin and destination and a timeframe, and then receive a rate and schedule based on a calculated route that includes a bunch of other passengers' similar requirements. The maximum cost would approach that of a taxi. The minimum cost would approach that of more standard public transit. There could be a deposit required to prevent abuse.
This could be a viable form of public transit in less densely populated cities, where buses are currently fairly worthless. It could also be more environmentally friendly than running empty buses in such places.
Certainly the way automation has been done historically, this is true. Automation has been used as a way to support more and more people with fewer and fewer resources. And this project is no exception. Here, automation is being bolted onto an existing system in order to extend the limits of it's capacity.
But if automation is built with appropriate redundancies, it is possible to guide technological development in such a way that small failures do not lead to large ones and the overall system becomes more robust as it simultaneously becomes more automated.
why don't we go a step further and finish what we already started long ago: automate every possible kind of work humans can do.
Automation has historically meant centralization. Raw materials were scarce, and machines took a long time to design and build. Investment in automation demanded profit. Centralization of production combined with the profit motive leads to trade imbalance and gross wealth disparity. Wealth disparity creates wage labor. Wage labor without reproductive controls leads to the creation of a permanent working class. A permanent working class demands a social welfare state. The social welfare state exists through wealth confiscation. Wealth confiscation reinforces centralization and prevents the emergence of small-scale automation capable of completely replacing human labor.
We are basically working towards a local minimum and would have to backtrack quite a ways before we could have the opportunity to progress beyond it.
Hu Jintao is on his way to Washington this week. The US and Chinese governments are basically married to each other at this point, whether they like it or not. And that marriage is built upon one thing: Western investment in a few big machines, operated by a bunch of small Chinese workers, and fed with resources extracted at gunpoint by the US military.
Personal robots would screw up that dynamic entirely.
That's the reason you see this constant droning fear-mongering bullshit about robot rights and robot liability and robot insurance from the US media-military-industrial complex. It isn't about safety or risk or even protecting American jobs. It's about protecting the incompetent globalist dipshits at the big banks who are selling out America to placate their hard-ons for centralized economic planning and production and a massive despotic government that confiscates the country's wealth just to dole it out to them via interest on their phony money and bail-outs of their stupid investments. It's about propping-up a means of economic production that is decidedly un-American, anti-middle-class and, in the long run, utterly self-destructive.
Seriously, who do you really think will be responsible when, instead of building you things and saving you money and keeping you from buying any more disposable consumer junk from the big-box stores and enabling you to retire and pay off your mortgage early, your household robot goes berserk and breaks all your china?
I wonder if this has to do with the removal of binary firmware blobs from the kernel of some distros. I disabled DRI a few months back after seeing a lot of instability in newer kernels.
Honestly, hardware acceleration is something I've never really counted on in Linux anyways. I tend to use some pretty random hardware, and I know that kernel drivers and Xorg are typically in a constant state of flux. So I usually don't enable it unless I'm playing around with some games in Wine. Linux is fast enough for other things that not having it doesn't make any difference.
1) While technically impressive, this is not "cloak and dagger" by any stretch of the imagination. Everyone knows Israel did it. They broadcast the code all over the world. "Cloak and dagger" implies some degree of stealth or misdirection.
2) If Israel had a spy in Iran's nuclear systems, why would Stuxnet have leaked out? Why wouldn't all the centrifuges just quietly self-destruct? It didn't take espionage to get the technical specs on Iran's centrifuges. They were reported to the IAEA. Sure, it's not impossible, but seems unlikely.
3) For the US, war is basically a right-wing welfare program, so there is constant pressure for lucrative new targets. Israel is perpetually engaging in economic warfare against basically everyone. The scare-mongering with respect to Iran's nuclear power program is just typical, sabre-rattling, lies exactly like those told about Saddam to drum up the Iraq invasion. An energy-independent Iran poses the same threat as Saddam's pricing oil in Euros and state gas subsidies: hastening the end of petrodollars and cheap oil for the US.
I've pretty much been on all sides of this issue, from being the under-resourced BOFH who wants to enforce standards, to being the newbie stuck with a six-year-old junk computer, to seeing the incompetent corporate purchasing of brand new systems that are inefficient, incompatible, or don't last two months in operation.
I say go for it.
Give employees a choice: 100% on your own, or 100% supported. Negotiate access to shared resources through open, standard protocols. Segregate in-house resources onto their own network; firewall off and monitor everything else. Make sure IT has the resources necessary to do the job. Put the people who buy their own at the end of the line for support requests.
It can definitely pay off and end up being win-win for everyone.
Actually that reminds me, on the subject of autocratic regimes and welded-shut hoods.
I recently did some work on a Ford that was having acceleration issues. It turns out, the problem was simple: the air flow sensor needed cleaning. Unfortunately, the air flow sensor is held in place by two "tamper-proof" Torx(TM) screws.
Now, as every self-respecting geek should know, there is really no such thing as a tamper-proof screw. In this case, it's actually just a "really expensive to remove" screw, because the special bits are patented and only sold through "restricted" channels (Sears). And thanks to that ridiculous Supreme Court case making such things legal, there are probably lots of contractual obligations attached. At Sears, the only option was to purchase an entire set of bits for $40. So, apparently, the strategy for making these screws "tamper proof" was to prevent the poor and people unaware of Sears from removing them.
A set of knock-off bits, shipped all the way from "autocratic" China, was only $2.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just one reason we don't take kindly to Canuckers telling us how great socialism is.
There's a Big Lever in D.C. It has two positions: 'invest' and 'consume'. The Big Lever is connected to a lot of things, but the tax code is a major one. "Profit" and "income" are separate concepts in the tax code, even though this is obviously nonsense. In the tax 'code', "profit" means "investment"; and "income" means "consumption". They have different definitions and different tax rates so that they can be connected to different ends of the Big Lever.
Regardless of the party in charge, the Big Lever is operated with one overriding goal: centralize control of everything. Maintain the status quo. Maximize profit at big corporations. Maximize individual consumption. Make as many people dependent on government and big business as possible. Depending on the state of the economy, the Big Lever is put into whichever position will effectuate this goal.
For instance, when productivity is rising or new technologies are being invented, the Big Lever is thrown into the "consume" position, in order to prevent them. Or, at least, in order to steer that productive effort into less disruptive, pointless consumerism. It might seem rational for individuals to want to invest in new technologies or to benefit from productivity gains. But this goes against the overriding goal of maintaining a centralized economy and a dependent populace. So the Big Lever is used to discourage individuals from making individually rational decisions that could upset the status quo. Talking heads on television spout doublethink nonsense like "macroeconomics is counter-intuitive" and "it's bad when everyone saves" in order to convince people that dependence and consumption are good even when they're obviously not.
Normally, when something bad like a natural disaster or national tragedy happens, what's the rational reaction? Stop consuming as much, start investing more? Arrange your assets to become a bit more independent, and more resilient to future disasters? But that means less centralization. So investment is bad in this instance. It upsets the status quo. It's not efficient. It cuts into corporate profits. It reduces the size of government. Government has a better plan that doesn't upset the status quo. They put the Big Lever in the 'consume' position. When a natural tragedy happens, they just cull the flock. Send some of them off to war. That keeps production up! It's good for the economy!
But when the economy is really doing poorly, when inflation is rising, when there's nothing left to consume, when people might want to take advantage of that "social safety net" they've been paying taxes for, that's when it's time to throw the lever into the 'invest' position. That's when we see the talking heads telling us to "roll up our sleeves" and "sacrifice". That's when it's time to cut benefits and wages and workers. Because that's the time when the workers have absolutely no other choice. They have become completely dependent on over-consumption and big business and big government. They were told to consume when they should have invested. Now they have no choice but to invest.
So when terrorists crash planes into buildings, just keep calm and carry on consuming. But when the American central bank crashes the economy building unnecessary houses and shopping malls, that's when you have to invest in bailing them out.
You see, the problem isn't that you're being fleeced. The problem is that you might escape.
So, what, a few stainless steel pumps, a few relays, and acres of glass tubes? How could photovoltaics possibly be cheaper than that?
Water has a pretty high thermal mass so I don't think variable temperatures are anything to worry about. Biocontamination can be dealt with fairly easily, by sequestration and redundancy. Waste product removal is a halfway interesting problem, but I'd bet Kevin Costner is working on it as we speak.
That would be funny if cyanobacteria were found growing underground.
Obligatory Family Guy
Somehow I don't think the idea of offshore nuclear reactors is all that unique, and certainly not "stolen from the Russians", seeing as how I have drawings of them here in a book from the 70s.
Putting it out of sight removes one more thing for the luddites to complain about. Putting it in the ocean is an obvious choice for cooling and for proximity to most of the world's population centers. And the steel used is probably cheaper than the concrete required on land; you can't crash a plane into a reactor under the ocean.
Okay I replaced all of my lightbulbs and bought some black-rimmed glasses now I'm riding my bicycle and I added a link to my blog to raise awareness. Is there some way that phonebanking can help?
MS saves a lot of money when interfacing with other systems and software
lol
Well, it depends. If your plan involves breeding a programmer specifically for the purpose, then, perhaps. Otherwise, no.
But time isn't money. That's a two-hundred year old maxim based on the marxian labor theory of value which should have been thoroughly discredited by now.
Thermodynamic order is money. So money is more proportional to something like temperature * time.
And 'temperature' in the information processing sense basically means the rate of data normalization, which is dependent upon all sorts of things, some of which are inversely proportional to time.
Lately I've been thinking about a system of on-demand buses that could negotiate with passengers to take them directly from one place to another with minimal inconvenience. One of the major disadvantages (needless in my opinion) of bus systems is the fact that they have fixed stops and fixed schedules. Going anywhere requires walking to a nearby stop, waiting around for a bus to show up, waiting while the bus stops every mile or so along the route, and then walking to your final destination. It could take two hours to go across town.
I'm thinking of something like a shuttle service that could be tied into an iPhone app. You could enter in your origin and destination and a timeframe, and then receive a rate and schedule based on a calculated route that includes a bunch of other passengers' similar requirements. The maximum cost would approach that of a taxi. The minimum cost would approach that of more standard public transit. There could be a deposit required to prevent abuse.
This could be a viable form of public transit in less densely populated cities, where buses are currently fairly worthless. It could also be more environmentally friendly than running empty buses in such places.
Not necessarily all automation.
Certainly the way automation has been done historically, this is true. Automation has been used as a way to support more and more people with fewer and fewer resources. And this project is no exception. Here, automation is being bolted onto an existing system in order to extend the limits of it's capacity.
But if automation is built with appropriate redundancies, it is possible to guide technological development in such a way that small failures do not lead to large ones and the overall system becomes more robust as it simultaneously becomes more automated.
why don't we go a step further and finish what we already started long ago: automate every possible kind of work humans can do.
Automation has historically meant centralization. Raw materials were scarce, and machines took a long time to design and build. Investment in automation demanded profit. Centralization of production combined with the profit motive leads to trade imbalance and gross wealth disparity. Wealth disparity creates wage labor. Wage labor without reproductive controls leads to the creation of a permanent working class. A permanent working class demands a social welfare state. The social welfare state exists through wealth confiscation. Wealth confiscation reinforces centralization and prevents the emergence of small-scale automation capable of completely replacing human labor.
We are basically working towards a local minimum and would have to backtrack quite a ways before we could have the opportunity to progress beyond it.
Hu Jintao is on his way to Washington this week. The US and Chinese governments are basically married to each other at this point, whether they like it or not. And that marriage is built upon one thing: Western investment in a few big machines, operated by a bunch of small Chinese workers, and fed with resources extracted at gunpoint by the US military.
Personal robots would screw up that dynamic entirely.
That's the reason you see this constant droning fear-mongering bullshit about robot rights and robot liability and robot insurance from the US media-military-industrial complex. It isn't about safety or risk or even protecting American jobs. It's about protecting the incompetent globalist dipshits at the big banks who are selling out America to placate their hard-ons for centralized economic planning and production and a massive despotic government that confiscates the country's wealth just to dole it out to them via interest on their phony money and bail-outs of their stupid investments. It's about propping-up a means of economic production that is decidedly un-American, anti-middle-class and, in the long run, utterly self-destructive.
Seriously, who do you really think will be responsible when, instead of building you things and saving you money and keeping you from buying any more disposable consumer junk from the big-box stores and enabling you to retire and pay off your mortgage early, your household robot goes berserk and breaks all your china?
I wonder if this has to do with the removal of binary firmware blobs from the kernel of some distros. I disabled DRI a few months back after seeing a lot of instability in newer kernels.
Honestly, hardware acceleration is something I've never really counted on in Linux anyways. I tend to use some pretty random hardware, and I know that kernel drivers and Xorg are typically in a constant state of flux. So I usually don't enable it unless I'm playing around with some games in Wine. Linux is fast enough for other things that not having it doesn't make any difference.
1) While technically impressive, this is not "cloak and dagger" by any stretch of the imagination. Everyone knows Israel did it. They broadcast the code all over the world. "Cloak and dagger" implies some degree of stealth or misdirection.
2) If Israel had a spy in Iran's nuclear systems, why would Stuxnet have leaked out? Why wouldn't all the centrifuges just quietly self-destruct? It didn't take espionage to get the technical specs on Iran's centrifuges. They were reported to the IAEA. Sure, it's not impossible, but seems unlikely.
3) For the US, war is basically a right-wing welfare program, so there is constant pressure for lucrative new targets. Israel is perpetually engaging in economic warfare against basically everyone. The scare-mongering with respect to Iran's nuclear power program is just typical, sabre-rattling, lies exactly like those told about Saddam to drum up the Iraq invasion. An energy-independent Iran poses the same threat as Saddam's pricing oil in Euros and state gas subsidies: hastening the end of petrodollars and cheap oil for the US.
In this case whoever did it seems to have averted war at least for a few years.
At times, it has frustrated me that the majority of people really think this way... with such a limited, uncritical, and reactionary world-view.
Lately I just feel sorry for you.
I've pretty much been on all sides of this issue, from being the under-resourced BOFH who wants to enforce standards, to being the newbie stuck with a six-year-old junk computer, to seeing the incompetent corporate purchasing of brand new systems that are inefficient, incompatible, or don't last two months in operation.
I say go for it.
Give employees a choice: 100% on your own, or 100% supported. Negotiate access to shared resources through open, standard protocols. Segregate in-house resources onto their own network; firewall off and monitor everything else. Make sure IT has the resources necessary to do the job. Put the people who buy their own at the end of the line for support requests.
It can definitely pay off and end up being win-win for everyone.
The Juche is loose.
Actually that reminds me, on the subject of autocratic regimes and welded-shut hoods.
I recently did some work on a Ford that was having acceleration issues. It turns out, the problem was simple: the air flow sensor needed cleaning. Unfortunately, the air flow sensor is held in place by two "tamper-proof" Torx(TM) screws.
Now, as every self-respecting geek should know, there is really no such thing as a tamper-proof screw. In this case, it's actually just a "really expensive to remove" screw, because the special bits are patented and only sold through "restricted" channels (Sears). And thanks to that ridiculous Supreme Court case making such things legal, there are probably lots of contractual obligations attached. At Sears, the only option was to purchase an entire set of bits for $40. So, apparently, the strategy for making these screws "tamper proof" was to prevent the poor and people unaware of Sears from removing them.
A set of knock-off bits, shipped all the way from "autocratic" China, was only $2.
Any idiot can buy yachts and planes. You're not a truly awesome geek millionaire until you have a self-sufficient private island.
The results sort of surprised me.
microsoft sucks vs. microsoft doesn't suck
Hmm, let's see what's going on here.
microsoft doesn't suck vs. microsoft doesn't suck that much
That makes more sense.
because wealth does tend to become concentrated over time
Wealth does not naturally become more concentrated. Absent force, wealth is always diluted. Some people just dilute wealth faster than others.