Of course it's fraud. Roosevelt sold it to American workers as an "annuity".
And since variable annuities didn't even exist in the US until 1952, everyone knew what he meant was a fixed annuity, rather than a risky investment with no guarantee of return.
Do you really think he wouldn't have been hung from a lamppost if he had tried to sell a 15% tax to go towards a risky investment with no ownership stake or entitlement to money back in the middle of the great depression?
if SS is anything like the civil war era northern army pension system, this would still be a substantial cost savings over doing it manually,
Yeah, the Social Security Administration records are maintained with quills and scrolls. They need $500 million to upgrade to computers otherwise they will have to go back to using stone tablets.
Sadly, this is probably more accurate than I'd like to believe.
You simply can't suddenly have an additional 30% or 50% or more people
Great, arbitrary figures. I guess you're arguing that it's not a Ponzi scheme since it happens slowly? Or because it's an inter-generational scam? The people who will be left with nothing haven't been born yet, so they don't exist? Or are you really delusional enough to believe the US economy will always grow faster than population growth...
Regardless, you're wrong anyways. You can easily have an additional 15-20% more people. One example is called the Baby Boomers. Another example is the 40 million immigrants who entered the US in the last two decades.
the positive balance it gained during periods of positive growth was borrowed by Congress
...to waste on unnecessary wars, not to invest in anything beneficial like infrastructure.
Social security will re-enter a positive growth period way before all the money now owed to it from the general fund is paid back.
Pigs will sprout wings and fly before that money is paid back. Successive waves of immigrants and the delusion of free trade will continue to bleed this country of jobs and wealth until there is absolutely nothing remaining with which to form an economy capable of paying off it's ridiculous debt.
What makes you think Mexicans don't have rights? And what makes you think someone needs to "give" them rights?
They have the right to inhabit their own country. They have the right to have a reasonable amount of children and to care for them and to work to improve their lives and to elect responsible government and not to invade other countries and sell and consume drugs and thieve and kidnap and murder tourists and generally fuck things up.
But we all know what you're saying. You're saying that Mexicans should have the 'right' to free healthcare and to jobs and to retirement benefits and to free education and to food stamps and to housing and to have dozens of kids they can't possibly manage to care for while someone else foots the bill.
If you implement an app that is well-designed and comprehensive, you are married to it for maintenance, your boss will not give you other projects, HR will wonder what they are paying you for, and eventually you will leave due to boredom and wage stagnation.
If you implement an app that is mostly functional but half-assed, you will be promoted and given a new underling to maintain your half-assed app for you and bring you coffee.
So, you see, this way enterprise apps naturally tend towards being just a bunch of Excel macros.
Firstly, it doesn't seem that you're really eschewing specialization. You're saying that, instead of carrying around one set of speakers and one input device and one set of memory and processor, you had four of each. Does that really sound like specialization?
Secondly, though, I think it's not really fair to compare physical specialization to specialization of information.
Physical objects have limitations. You can only own and carry around so many portable electronic devices. Information not so much. You can carry around a relatively infinite amount of code.
Therefore, physical objects which can serve multiple functions are more valuable than those that can't: programmable circuitry, touchscreens, etc.
Specialized code which can be instantaneously combined with generic physical objects is more valuable still.
Also, consider some of the tradeoffs involved to get a portable generic computing device that fits in your pocket. Your iPhone is still very specialized. It runs special software. It is comprised of some very specialized integrated circuits. It has many custom components that are not easily interchanged.
It's not just a collection of individual transistors on a breadboard.
Anybody can understand how that can save valuable human tester time (particularly if that human is expensive and talented).
Well, wherever you live that might be true. But in the US, home of gangster-capitalist-accounting-fraud-as-a-defense-against-the-social-democratic-kleptocracy, showing your boss something you've automated would just make him think "Why did you waste time doing this when I could have outsourced it to a shell-company in which I have a 49% stake and hired some Indians to write it and taken that new tax write-off for creating jobs in a gay woman minority owned software outsourcing firm. Now I'm going to have to track it as a capital expense, ugh."
There's this thing, called 'specialization'. You work for a small business somewhere in the Western world, so you probably have never heard of it.
Basically, the way it works is this. One person does one job. Another person does another. Everyone sort of agrees ahead of time what the jobs will be, and how they can interact in the most efficient and least obtrusive way. That way, you don't end up with five people on a 'team' spending all their time either in meetings or overwriting each other's work.
For instance, one person might fix bugs. Another person might test the software. Each person can 'specialize' in one relatively small area of 'special' knowledge and skills and not have to worry about everything his co-workers are doing. The person fixing bugs can know which bugs have been fixed, and spend time thinking about how the software should evolve in the future in order to fix or prevent other bugs. The person testing the software can spend his time creating automated tests, finding new bugs to be fixed, and double-checking the work of the people fixing the bugs.
Watch out, though! Because there's this other thing, of which you are probably well aware, called the 'pointy-haired boss'. Pointy-haired bosses don't like 'specialization' because they are fairly dim-witted and actually enjoy going to meetings and re-doing the same work over and over again. So, if you do decide to 'specialize' in your work, you should probably have a few websites lined up to browse and look like you're staying busy during all that extra free time you will soon have. Good luck!
This is Econ 101 shit and it's embarrassing that Western countries are selling out their high tech companies for a bunch of government debt, poisoned food and defective consumer crap.
Yes, really. It's been true for nearly a decade. This one took about three minutes to find on google. There are literally dozens of these sorts of projects around. I find it rather incredulous that you own a/. account and haven't heard of them. If you'd like, I'd be happy to bill you for my services in finding it and you can call it "commercial".
CO2 per kilometer is a horrible metric. No biodiesel for them, then. It sounds like the point of this is to limit greenhouse gas emissions, but all it will really do is reduce fuel consumption and move the CO2 emission to other areas. That's what would happen in the US at least. We don't have as much nuclear power, and tend to consume more oil-based plastic goods than Europeans. Regardless, it's easy for well-intentioned regulations to have counterproductive effects.
Take this as an example. I have a 2.5 ton diesel truck that is over 40 years old. It gets pretty terrible gas mileage. But it's entirely possible that it will last another 40 years. I use it once every six months or so on average. I could buy a new truck. Buying a new truck would mean thirty thousand dollars worth of CO2-intensive manufacturing, steel parts and such. The new truck wouldn't last as long, and would need to be replaced probably within the next 20 years.
I could rent a truck instead. On average, that would cost about the same as the truck I already have, possibly more. Instead of driving directly to where I want to go, I would have to drive to the truck rental store, drive to where I want to go, drive home, drive back to the truck rental store, and then drive back home. And if I rent a truck, the proceeds would likely go to some employees and shareholders who use the money to increase their consumption of goods, food, gasoline and electricity all produced by emitting CO2 as well. So the net result is similar if not more CO2 usage.
Central economic planning is harder than it might seem.
This is what I do to avoid lugging a laptop around:
Buy a 32gb USB flash drive, and store all of your data on it. Use Unison to sync the flash drive with all your computers as necessary. Once you learn not to make incompatible changes on both computers, syncing is extremely quick and easy. An added benefit is that you automatically get a redundant off-site backup.
Well, for one, you don't really need specialized hardware at all. That cost would make thin clients pretty pointless. And, as others mentioned, one benefit that also offsets the up-front migration cost is the fact that you no longer have to replace your desktops every three years.
Yeah, it's useful for a niche market that has high security requirements and a fairly homogenous set of apps. In places like doctor's offices, law firms, and banks, it works well.
I'm guessing you just want to be able to use any random computer you come across. Personally, I would suggest something more like a liveCD.
You wouldn't enjoy running VNC or RDP over the internet unless you have a really good connection. The connection would also need to be encrypted, which adds latency and/or complexity to the setup. Just using a remote file server or domain controller would be much nicer. At least then you are running apps locally and the lag is manageable.
Mounting a remote share is trivial, and virtual servers are pretty cheap. And it's certainly possible to just store your desktop settings on a remote file server in both Linux and Windows. But it does require some setup on the local machine.
This is one of the most important things for supporters of Free Software to understand: businesses are subsidized by the tax code. All businesses, even the terrible ones. Especially the terrible ones.
It doesn't matter which country you're talking about. The economies of nearly every Western government are equally hosed up in the same ridiculous way. Tax agencies assume that everything an individual purchases is consumed, and that everything a corporation purchases is an investment. As far as taxing authorities are concerned, a Windows computer is an investment. It is capital. It fits the obsolete model of production that governments know: labor + capital == profit. When you buy anything as a business, you write it off your taxes and pat yourself on the back.
A non-corporate, non-business operating system, on the other hand, is a toy. It's a distraction, a hobby. Governments consider it not to be an investment, but a consumer item. Same goes for an Android phone. It's assumed to depreciate in value. A Windows phone, though, is for business. It's assumed to produce value. Nevermind the fact that most Windows phones are unproductive toys, or that most Windows computers are inefficient cludges. Nevermind the fact that free and open source software can be orders of magnitude more efficient and productive than proprietary, closed source software. Windows is a capital investment. Free software is a toy.
The result should be obvious. Responsible, non-consumer individuals are punished. Wasteful, non-producing companies are subsidized. Long term investments in things like open standards are discouraged. Short term speculation is encouraged.
It really is as simple as that. Governments don't consider it further. The idea of a Windows computer running a nuclear power plant, therefore, seems perfectly natural. Debian? A toy. Red Hat? One of the most expensive operating systems ever. They are 99% the exact same code. One is a tax write-off produced by a legitimate company. The other is a toy produced by a bunch of hobbyists. In the US, we see all of these crap small businesses that can no longer afford their rent. Corporate real estate is about to take a dump all over itself. Banks are over leveraged, and it turns out they own no real assets. They were subsidized. They bought a bunch of consumable junk like Windows computers, shoddy houses and uninsulated office buildings, wrote it off as a brilliant investment, and waited for the profit to roll in. Unfortunately, everyone else did the same, all the real assets went overseas, and now the US economy is utter crap.
Slashdot Mirror
This is really the only comment this story requires.
Of course it's fraud. Roosevelt sold it to American workers as an "annuity".
And since variable annuities didn't even exist in the US until 1952, everyone knew what he meant was a fixed annuity, rather than a risky investment with no guarantee of return.
Do you really think he wouldn't have been hung from a lamppost if he had tried to sell a 15% tax to go towards a risky investment with no ownership stake or entitlement to money back in the middle of the great depression?
if SS is anything like the civil war era northern army pension system, this would still be a substantial cost savings over doing it manually,
Yeah, the Social Security Administration records are maintained with quills and scrolls. They need $500 million to upgrade to computers otherwise they will have to go back to using stone tablets.
Sadly, this is probably more accurate than I'd like to believe.
You simply can't suddenly have an additional 30% or 50% or more people
Great, arbitrary figures. I guess you're arguing that it's not a Ponzi scheme since it happens slowly? Or because it's an inter-generational scam? The people who will be left with nothing haven't been born yet, so they don't exist? Or are you really delusional enough to believe the US economy will always grow faster than population growth...
Regardless, you're wrong anyways. You can easily have an additional 15-20% more people. One example is called the Baby Boomers. Another example is the 40 million immigrants who entered the US in the last two decades.
the positive balance it gained during periods of positive growth was borrowed by Congress
...to waste on unnecessary wars, not to invest in anything beneficial like infrastructure.
Social security will re-enter a positive growth period way before all the money now owed to it from the general fund is paid back.
Pigs will sprout wings and fly before that money is paid back. Successive waves of immigrants and the delusion of free trade will continue to bleed this country of jobs and wealth until there is absolutely nothing remaining with which to form an economy capable of paying off it's ridiculous debt.
That channel and videos don't seem to have a particular political slant one way or another.
Trickling-down is not the same as recycling.
What makes you think Mexicans don't have rights? And what makes you think someone needs to "give" them rights?
They have the right to inhabit their own country. They have the right to have a reasonable amount of children and to care for them and to work to improve their lives and to elect responsible government and not to invade other countries and sell and consume drugs and thieve and kidnap and murder tourists and generally fuck things up.
But we all know what you're saying. You're saying that Mexicans should have the 'right' to free healthcare and to jobs and to retirement benefits and to free education and to food stamps and to housing and to have dozens of kids they can't possibly manage to care for while someone else foots the bill.
You have no idea what rights even are.
Self Potato
Here's the way it works.
If you implement an app that is well-designed and comprehensive, you are married to it for maintenance, your boss will not give you other projects, HR will wonder what they are paying you for, and eventually you will leave due to boredom and wage stagnation.
If you implement an app that is mostly functional but half-assed, you will be promoted and given a new underling to maintain your half-assed app for you and bring you coffee.
So, you see, this way enterprise apps naturally tend towards being just a bunch of Excel macros.
I'd guess that a saltwater/ionizing filter has a polarity. And that reversing it would probably produce Brown's gas, which would eventually ignite.
These aren't the droids we're looking for.
"Specialization is for insects." -- Heinlein.
Firstly, it doesn't seem that you're really eschewing specialization. You're saying that, instead of carrying around one set of speakers and one input device and one set of memory and processor, you had four of each. Does that really sound like specialization?
Secondly, though, I think it's not really fair to compare physical specialization to specialization of information.
Physical objects have limitations. You can only own and carry around so many portable electronic devices. Information not so much. You can carry around a relatively infinite amount of code.
Therefore, physical objects which can serve multiple functions are more valuable than those that can't: programmable circuitry, touchscreens, etc.
Specialized code which can be instantaneously combined with generic physical objects is more valuable still.
Also, consider some of the tradeoffs involved to get a portable generic computing device that fits in your pocket. Your iPhone is still very specialized. It runs special software. It is comprised of some very specialized integrated circuits. It has many custom components that are not easily interchanged.
It's not just a collection of individual transistors on a breadboard.
Anybody can understand how that can save valuable human tester time (particularly if that human is expensive and talented).
Well, wherever you live that might be true. But in the US, home of gangster-capitalist-accounting-fraud-as-a-defense-against-the-social-democratic-kleptocracy, showing your boss something you've automated would just make him think "Why did you waste time doing this when I could have outsourced it to a shell-company in which I have a 49% stake and hired some Indians to write it and taken that new tax write-off for creating jobs in a gay woman minority owned software outsourcing firm. Now I'm going to have to track it as a capital expense, ugh."
There's this thing, called 'specialization'. You work for a small business somewhere in the Western world, so you probably have never heard of it.
Basically, the way it works is this. One person does one job. Another person does another. Everyone sort of agrees ahead of time what the jobs will be, and how they can interact in the most efficient and least obtrusive way. That way, you don't end up with five people on a 'team' spending all their time either in meetings or overwriting each other's work.
For instance, one person might fix bugs. Another person might test the software. Each person can 'specialize' in one relatively small area of 'special' knowledge and skills and not have to worry about everything his co-workers are doing. The person fixing bugs can know which bugs have been fixed, and spend time thinking about how the software should evolve in the future in order to fix or prevent other bugs. The person testing the software can spend his time creating automated tests, finding new bugs to be fixed, and double-checking the work of the people fixing the bugs.
Watch out, though! Because there's this other thing, of which you are probably well aware, called the 'pointy-haired boss'. Pointy-haired bosses don't like 'specialization' because they are fairly dim-witted and actually enjoy going to meetings and re-doing the same work over and over again. So, if you do decide to 'specialize' in your work, you should probably have a few websites lined up to browse and look like you're staying busy during all that extra free time you will soon have. Good luck!
This is Econ 101 shit and it's embarrassing that Western countries are selling out their high tech companies for a bunch of government debt, poisoned food and defective consumer crap.
You think subsidizing fuel disincentivized travel?
lol yeah I'm sure you would each make trillions of NY-bucks trading each other fraudulent derivatives in hobo urine futures.
There's something deeply ironic about capitalist consultants scamming a city in instituting the labor theory of value for government workers.
Really?
Yes, really. It's been true for nearly a decade. This one took about three minutes to find on google. There are literally dozens of these sorts of projects around. I find it rather incredulous that you own a /. account and haven't heard of them. If you'd like, I'd be happy to bill you for my services in finding it and you can call it "commercial".
CO2 per kilometer is a horrible metric. No biodiesel for them, then. It sounds like the point of this is to limit greenhouse gas emissions, but all it will really do is reduce fuel consumption and move the CO2 emission to other areas. That's what would happen in the US at least. We don't have as much nuclear power, and tend to consume more oil-based plastic goods than Europeans. Regardless, it's easy for well-intentioned regulations to have counterproductive effects.
Take this as an example. I have a 2.5 ton diesel truck that is over 40 years old. It gets pretty terrible gas mileage. But it's entirely possible that it will last another 40 years. I use it once every six months or so on average. I could buy a new truck. Buying a new truck would mean thirty thousand dollars worth of CO2-intensive manufacturing, steel parts and such. The new truck wouldn't last as long, and would need to be replaced probably within the next 20 years.
I could rent a truck instead. On average, that would cost about the same as the truck I already have, possibly more. Instead of driving directly to where I want to go, I would have to drive to the truck rental store, drive to where I want to go, drive home, drive back to the truck rental store, and then drive back home. And if I rent a truck, the proceeds would likely go to some employees and shareholders who use the money to increase their consumption of goods, food, gasoline and electricity all produced by emitting CO2 as well. So the net result is similar if not more CO2 usage.
Central economic planning is harder than it might seem.
This is what I do to avoid lugging a laptop around:
Buy a 32gb USB flash drive, and store all of your data on it. Use Unison to sync the flash drive with all your computers as necessary. Once you learn not to make incompatible changes on both computers, syncing is extremely quick and easy. An added benefit is that you automatically get a redundant off-site backup.
Well, for one, you don't really need specialized hardware at all. That cost would make thin clients pretty pointless. And, as others mentioned, one benefit that also offsets the up-front migration cost is the fact that you no longer have to replace your desktops every three years.
Yeah, it's useful for a niche market that has high security requirements and a fairly homogenous set of apps. In places like doctor's offices, law firms, and banks, it works well.
I'm guessing you just want to be able to use any random computer you come across. Personally, I would suggest something more like a liveCD.
You wouldn't enjoy running VNC or RDP over the internet unless you have a really good connection. The connection would also need to be encrypted, which adds latency and/or complexity to the setup. Just using a remote file server or domain controller would be much nicer. At least then you are running apps locally and the lag is manageable.
Mounting a remote share is trivial, and virtual servers are pretty cheap. And it's certainly possible to just store your desktop settings on a remote file server in both Linux and Windows. But it does require some setup on the local machine.
This is one of the most important things for supporters of Free Software to understand: businesses are subsidized by the tax code. All businesses, even the terrible ones. Especially the terrible ones.
It doesn't matter which country you're talking about. The economies of nearly every Western government are equally hosed up in the same ridiculous way. Tax agencies assume that everything an individual purchases is consumed, and that everything a corporation purchases is an investment. As far as taxing authorities are concerned, a Windows computer is an investment. It is capital. It fits the obsolete model of production that governments know: labor + capital == profit. When you buy anything as a business, you write it off your taxes and pat yourself on the back.
A non-corporate, non-business operating system, on the other hand, is a toy. It's a distraction, a hobby. Governments consider it not to be an investment, but a consumer item. Same goes for an Android phone. It's assumed to depreciate in value. A Windows phone, though, is for business. It's assumed to produce value. Nevermind the fact that most Windows phones are unproductive toys, or that most Windows computers are inefficient cludges. Nevermind the fact that free and open source software can be orders of magnitude more efficient and productive than proprietary, closed source software. Windows is a capital investment. Free software is a toy.
The result should be obvious. Responsible, non-consumer individuals are punished. Wasteful, non-producing companies are subsidized. Long term investments in things like open standards are discouraged. Short term speculation is encouraged.
It really is as simple as that. Governments don't consider it further. The idea of a Windows computer running a nuclear power plant, therefore, seems perfectly natural. Debian? A toy. Red Hat? One of the most expensive operating systems ever. They are 99% the exact same code. One is a tax write-off produced by a legitimate company. The other is a toy produced by a bunch of hobbyists. In the US, we see all of these crap small businesses that can no longer afford their rent. Corporate real estate is about to take a dump all over itself. Banks are over leveraged, and it turns out they own no real assets. They were subsidized. They bought a bunch of consumable junk like Windows computers, shoddy houses and uninsulated office buildings, wrote it off as a brilliant investment, and waited for the profit to roll in. Unfortunately, everyone else did the same, all the real assets went overseas, and now the US economy is utter crap.