In a way, they probably capitalized more by not developing them. Established companies tend to grow by hiring people with useful skills, and then only utilizing them for about 5% of their productive day. The rest of the time, they sit around over-paid and under-employed, thinking of ways to improve the business.
But actually implementing any of those changes would be prohibitively expensive in a company that has 20x more employees than it needs. And, for a long period, longer than the patent protection perhaps, the marginal benefit of the new technology is so much less than the profit generated by the established tech that it isn't even worth trying to productize. So, yeah, you could say poor management but it's really more of a strategic decision to capitalize on a core technology and stifle alternatives rather than driving innovations into the market.
Examples abound in every industry, autos, energy. Take Google, for instance: tons of money made on basically just little text ads. And that's used to fund all sorts of interesting research that will never make them a dime. The number of employees grows. The stock goes up. The core business never changes. Dividends are never paid. Investors never benefit from 90% of the profits which are spent on employees sitting around innovating technologies that are never used.
Okay, salt is horrible for you. And it's overused almost everywhere, in canned foods, poultry, every type of fast food, most chain restaurants, baked goods, etc...
BUT.. outlawing it is just stupid. It's nice to be able to go to a restaurant every once in a while and get a meal that's actually well-prepared and tastes good. And that requires some salt, at least. This is a luxury good. And restaurants that provide this luxury can rightly charge higher prices for it.
Unfortunately, this means that those restaurants tend to dominate the market. The problem occurs when this becomes the food that average people eat every day, fast food, prepared foods at home and at chain restaurants, rather than the random meal eaten at an authentic restaurant. Americans don't prepare their own meals nearly as much any more, and when they do, they aren't as picky as they should be about it's contents.
And why is this? Well, we are busy. Americans over-work. When the economy is doing well or when our skills are in demand, we work 12 hr days and don't have time for anything but fast food. When the economy is doing poorly, we are still dependent upon prepared foods because most of us haven't developed the skills to prepare food from scratch. And, more importantly, the infrastructure isn't there to support fresh foods at your local grocery store. Fresh food is more expensive, and unemployed people don't prefer expensive foods over inexpensive ones. The market demands food that is fast and cheap, not healthy.
Okay, and why is that the case? Western capitalism requires you to work in order to survive. Specialization and corporatism favor those who work longer hours over those who work fewer. People are cheap, subsidized even. The cost of reproduction is minimal. Health is an afterthought, a political issue rather than a personal responsibility.
And, importantly, this system is maintained by force. It's not inherently sustainable. When it fails, it is bailed out by government fiat, perpetuating the cycle of boom and bust that creates such horrible dietary habits, and reliance on prepared and fast foods, in the first place. Interest rates are held artificially low (0.75% right now), giving the signal to out-of-work Americans that they shouldn't bother investing in any type of reasonable, sustainable infrastructure for healthy food preparation because they will be back to working 12 hour days soon (when the next bubble is inflated) and relying on more unhealthy salt-laden fast food.
So, once again, the proposed solution for government force and interference is more government force and interference, rather than eliminating the source (lousy government) that caused the problem in the first place.
When some people find that their job doesn't pay enough for their lifestyle they look for a new, better paid job.
And when there are no "new, better paid jobs", what then?
I'll tell you what happens then. Then, the act of poor Mexicans producing more poor Mexicans to send into my country in search of resources to support them becomes an act of war. Because, then, either the resources of my country support me and my lifestyle or they support a dozen illegal immigrants.
Do we complain when Newegg sells us memory cheaper than elsewhere?
Do you complain when slave-traders sell you illegal workers cheaper than local laborers?
Computer hardware doesn't have rights. It doesn't consume resources. It's not entitled to welfare or benefits. It can be destroyed when it is in oversupply and re-purposed. Humans can't be.
And why should the government penalise people willing to work for less?
Government should encourage improvement in living standards rather than a race to the bottom.
It's my country, too. And I'd welcome another 20 million heads,
Pay attention, kids. This is called the "tragedy of the commons". This guy profits from poor people, so he's happy to support a bunch of them on public resources so that he can personally profit by it.
I remember where we came from.
Do you remember the sparsely-populated, resource-rich country that was America, or the overpopulated tyrannical hellhole that was Europe? Which one were you hoping to return to?
"Government, stay outta my life! Unless it's to regulate behavior that violates my rights."
And that's all it ever needs to be.
Someone smoking pot doesn't violate my rights unless they blow it in my face. Prayer in schools doesn't violate my rights if those schools are private and voluntary and supported by vouchers. Gay marriage doesn't violate my rights because the state has no business licensing marriage in the first place.
Mexicans don't violate my rights until they breed themselves into poverty and destroy their own country and flee into mine in order to commit crimes and vote in our comically fraudulent elections and sign up for welfare and subsidized construction jobs* and free education and pop out a bunch of birth-right citizen anchor-baby future welfare cases.
The day I am forced to get an unconstitutional "biometric ID card" in order not to have my job opportunities, directly subsidized by taxes, government-sponsored monopolies and other expropriated wealth, stolen by an illegal immigrant is the day that it's time to dissolve the federal government and revert it's duties back to states that have some semblance of fiscal responsibility and individual rights.
And I say this of course under the near-universal assumption (by now) that this, along with everything else the US government does, will do absolutely nothing to curb illegal immigration or salvage jobs or benefit Americans and instead will be used simply as another tool of inept government to punish the compliant and reward criminals and cheaters and traitor banks and businesses.
The US is no longer a functional government. It can't regulate borders. It dissolves them and signs them away in supranational treaties. It can't regulate trade or abusive businesses. It supports them and bails them out when they fail. It can't win wars. It can't even define "winning" in terms of the bullshit wars it now engages in. It can't regulate reproduction or resource consumption or immigration or anything that actually affects the long term well-being of it's citizens. All it can do at this point is make token bullshit infringements on the rights of anyone unlucky or stupid enough to get in it's way, accomplishing absolutely nothing save crippling debt increases in the process.
You're just not looking at the problem the right way. This is a simple solution to the problem of "how to get paid every time a poor person takes a dump". It's the pinnacle of capitalist science, really.. a major achievement. It's all downhill from here, folks. This man has successfully applied the razor and blades model to human existence: free human, $0.02 per poop for the rest of his life. Let no one claim that western civilization never accomplished anything.
Obviously I'm not suggesting that that's desirable. I am, however, suggesting that it's better to optimize your business in terms of dollars rather than in terms of time or computational efficiency.
It's both. They're intimately linked. Code that is written "efficiently" is usually impossible to maintain, and thus is inefficient in terms of the "solution". That's the point. The most efficiently written code is the code that you don't write, but you just purchase as a pre-made binary. It's also the code that is completely worthless to you in the long run because it disintermediates you from the ultimate end-beneficiary.
Which is better for any given situation? Obviously some combination of both: code that can be written efficiently while still fitting into the big picture. Saying that you're going to always write the most solution-efficient code from scratch every time is just as foolish as trying to efficiently piece together someone else's code and expecting it to last.
It's the price of 100 computers for every script written by a non-programmer.
Okay, yes I was not entirely clear but I realize this is true based on your example, so I concede that even the best scripting language is no match for a determined idiot. And if you can find enough of said idiots to keep you employed, more power to you. I'm certainly not advocating that scripts created by unskilled users replace the need for legitimate scientific programming.
A factor of 12 improvement is, in my experience, fairly typical. And, yes, you can maintain 100 computers for the price of a single competent programmer. So, while it's not the best solution, it is certainly a very economical one.
A factor of 1400 improvement, as you claim, is simply ridiculous.
Hmm, yes. I didn't really mean buying a "new" car. I meant a newer, used one. Another result of improved design processes is that nowadays all the parts on your car tend to fail at around the same time. So, unless your car is relatively new (ie under warranty), making major repairs has become more of a losing proposition.
If you're really pissed about this, then you haven't really thought it through.
Natural resources are finite. The supply of human labor is finite. It is impossible to expend infinite amounts of resources extending human life. You've been lied to if you believe you don't have to care about these truths. And if your government is the one who has told you this lie, that just means that they will take on the responsibility of reconciling any disconnect between your perception and reality, by force, whenever necessary.
I'm curious to know the mechanism by which you, as a physicist, view hoarding as impeding progress.
I will admit that most people do have an instinct for hoarding. But I don't believe the vast majority do anywhere close to an effective job of it. And I don't think that hoarding, per se, should have any negative effect. Rather the opposite, actually.
My own view is that consumption, rather than hoarding, has a long-term deleterious effect on living standards. And that what most people consider "hoarding" is actually consumption. True hoarding would act to preserve resources for future consumption, which would derive more benefit due to advances in technology than current consumption. But I'm interested to hear what others think.
First of all, just taking safety for instance, it's nearly impossible to determine how to solve a safety problem in the "most efficient" way possible. What's the "most efficient" way to build a safe nuclear reactor? Make one that is 100% melt-down proof? You waste nuclear fuel. Make one that is completely incapable of being repurposed for nuclear weapons? You increase cost beyond market feasibility. Don't build nuclear power plants at all? People die from lack of energy. What's the "most efficient" way to build a safe car? What's the "most efficient" way to build a safe bridge? There are simply far too many variables, all interdependent in subtle ways, to consider. Add an extra layer of corrosion allowance, for instance, and you may prevent a bridge from collapsing and save a dozen lives. On the other hand, you may trigger a resource shortage that bankrupts a major company and destroys a thousand. Physical implications are obvious, but software is analogous. Spend ten billion dollars writing the perfect space shuttle control software, and you might save a dozen astronauts. Fail to develop a viable space exploration program in time, and humanity could be wiped out by the next asteroid. You're right, though, those aren't really software problems per se, and should be clearly defined as part of "the problem". Often they aren't.
But, yes, I'm assuming #2. I think it's clear from the GP that this is the manner in which "most efficient" was used.
But my point is also that it's not just the "efficiency" of the program itself or it's maintenance. It's the efficiency of the entire business and how the software fits into it. The cost of software in most business cases is trivial compared to it's benefits. Which, I think, is the reason we see so much software being re-invented over and over again to begin with. What isn't taken into account, though, is the cost of getting software wrong.
But, you realize, that's entirely true. Here's a vaulted car analogy:
American cars were historically bolted together, or welded together from standard parts supplied by thousands of different suppliers. If you wanted to, you can take an old American truck, completely disassemble it, replace almost any piece and re-build it from the ground up. That business model worked when the design costs of a car were vastly greater than the manufacturing costs. By using standard parts, those costs were spread out over many years and many models. Each part was not optimized to each car, but it was cheaper to manufacture and maintain regardless. American car manufacturers stuck with this, due to several factors, even in the face of superior competitors with vastly different processes. We all know how that turned out.
Today, almost every piece of a car is custom-designed, not shared with other models. Robots weld auto bodies into a single piece. People spend more time working in the design phase, not as much in the manufacturing. Trimming excess materials from the design is nearly a science. The cost of repairing or rebuilding a car is prohibitive compared to the cost of simply buying a new one. American car companies that failed to adapt, along with their parts suppliers, are going bankrupt.
Now, is one model superior to the other? No. They each have strengths and weaknesses. Asian workers were not necessarily better-off than American workers, despite their technological advantages. Asian automotive companies evolved in an environment rich in talented labor and poor in natural resources. They used design and lots of mental "work" to conserve natural resources. American automotive companies evolved in the opposite environment, poor in skilled labor and rich in unskilled labor and natural resources. They used natural resources and unskilled labor to make up for lack of skilled design work.
Ideally we would all be best off if we lived in an environment rich in natural resources and talented labor, while still conserving both. Technology, correctly applied, can help us achieve this. But only if the advances of technology are not negated by the proliferation of unskilled labor or wasteful resource consumption.
That's the kind of thinking that leads to batch jobs taking an hour, that should be done in 5 minutes or less.
I've said this before and I'll say it again, because I've created plenty of unoptimized "batch jobs" that take longer than they should.
COMPUTERS ARE CHEAPER THAN HUMANS
A cubicle filled with racks of computers running inefficient batch jobs costs a tiny fraction of a competent person sitting in the same cubicle and optimizing every little thing by hand. And a program written in a high-level language is probably cheaper to maintain over the long run as well.
If my goal is the solve a problem for a customer then I'm going to do that in the most efficient way possible.
I realize you're just tooting your own horn, but you're living in fantasy land if you think this is how it actually works, or even should work. The customer might not even want the "most efficient" thing. They might want an over-engineered thing. They might want the safest thing. They might want the most environmentally responsible thing. They might want the most flexible thing or the most interoperable thing. They might want the thing that works with whatever broken systems they already have. They might want the thing that they can build upon to grow their business in the future. Hell, you might be getting paid by the hour, so your incentive might be to create things in the least efficient, but still passable, way possible.
But it's important not to confuse "an over-engineered thing that is already there and working" with whatever under-engineered thing just happens to be laying around.
DRM, smart-cards, cable/tv access boxes, media players, stolen laptops, etc
Probably not e-commerce servers exactly, but you never know depending on the physical security of your datacenter. And with DRM, of course, the purpose is to lock you out of equipment to which you have physical access.
1) No one's going to be developing anything in 5-10 years. NSA will pull something out of a hat that's been in the works for decades. And it'll probably be exactly what you guessed.
2) "Dealing" with the private sector sounds ominous.
3) This sounds suspiciously like DRM. Oh, you do business with the feds? You'll need to use certified, "trusted" systems that allow NSA to remotely memory-hole anything you're accidentally sent.
4) Next step: Internet user licensing. Say goodbye to anonymity. Three-strikes and your internet access is revoked.
Slashdot Mirror
In a way, they probably capitalized more by not developing them. Established companies tend to grow by hiring people with useful skills, and then only utilizing them for about 5% of their productive day. The rest of the time, they sit around over-paid and under-employed, thinking of ways to improve the business.
But actually implementing any of those changes would be prohibitively expensive in a company that has 20x more employees than it needs. And, for a long period, longer than the patent protection perhaps, the marginal benefit of the new technology is so much less than the profit generated by the established tech that it isn't even worth trying to productize. So, yeah, you could say poor management but it's really more of a strategic decision to capitalize on a core technology and stifle alternatives rather than driving innovations into the market.
Examples abound in every industry, autos, energy. Take Google, for instance: tons of money made on basically just little text ads. And that's used to fund all sorts of interesting research that will never make them a dime. The number of employees grows. The stock goes up. The core business never changes. Dividends are never paid. Investors never benefit from 90% of the profits which are spent on employees sitting around innovating technologies that are never used.
Okay, salt is horrible for you. And it's overused almost everywhere, in canned foods, poultry, every type of fast food, most chain restaurants, baked goods, etc...
BUT.. outlawing it is just stupid. It's nice to be able to go to a restaurant every once in a while and get a meal that's actually well-prepared and tastes good. And that requires some salt, at least. This is a luxury good. And restaurants that provide this luxury can rightly charge higher prices for it.
Unfortunately, this means that those restaurants tend to dominate the market. The problem occurs when this becomes the food that average people eat every day, fast food, prepared foods at home and at chain restaurants, rather than the random meal eaten at an authentic restaurant. Americans don't prepare their own meals nearly as much any more, and when they do, they aren't as picky as they should be about it's contents.
And why is this? Well, we are busy. Americans over-work. When the economy is doing well or when our skills are in demand, we work 12 hr days and don't have time for anything but fast food. When the economy is doing poorly, we are still dependent upon prepared foods because most of us haven't developed the skills to prepare food from scratch. And, more importantly, the infrastructure isn't there to support fresh foods at your local grocery store. Fresh food is more expensive, and unemployed people don't prefer expensive foods over inexpensive ones. The market demands food that is fast and cheap, not healthy.
Okay, and why is that the case? Western capitalism requires you to work in order to survive. Specialization and corporatism favor those who work longer hours over those who work fewer. People are cheap, subsidized even. The cost of reproduction is minimal. Health is an afterthought, a political issue rather than a personal responsibility.
And, importantly, this system is maintained by force. It's not inherently sustainable. When it fails, it is bailed out by government fiat, perpetuating the cycle of boom and bust that creates such horrible dietary habits, and reliance on prepared and fast foods, in the first place. Interest rates are held artificially low (0.75% right now), giving the signal to out-of-work Americans that they shouldn't bother investing in any type of reasonable, sustainable infrastructure for healthy food preparation because they will be back to working 12 hour days soon (when the next bubble is inflated) and relying on more unhealthy salt-laden fast food.
So, once again, the proposed solution for government force and interference is more government force and interference, rather than eliminating the source (lousy government) that caused the problem in the first place.
I am also glad that taxpayer-funded stimulus is helping all Americans instead of just the wealthy political elite.
What a profoundly ignorant comment.
When some people find that their job doesn't pay enough for their lifestyle they look for a new, better paid job.
And when there are no "new, better paid jobs", what then?
I'll tell you what happens then. Then, the act of poor Mexicans producing more poor Mexicans to send into my country in search of resources to support them becomes an act of war. Because, then, either the resources of my country support me and my lifestyle or they support a dozen illegal immigrants.
Do we complain when Newegg sells us memory cheaper than elsewhere?
Do you complain when slave-traders sell you illegal workers cheaper than local laborers?
Computer hardware doesn't have rights. It doesn't consume resources. It's not entitled to welfare or benefits. It can be destroyed when it is in oversupply and re-purposed. Humans can't be.
And why should the government penalise people willing to work for less?
Government should encourage improvement in living standards rather than a race to the bottom.
It's my country, too. And I'd welcome another 20 million heads,
Pay attention, kids. This is called the "tragedy of the commons". This guy profits from poor people, so he's happy to support a bunch of them on public resources so that he can personally profit by it.
I remember where we came from.
Do you remember the sparsely-populated, resource-rich country that was America, or the overpopulated tyrannical hellhole that was Europe? Which one were you hoping to return to?
As a libertarian, it's:
"Government, stay outta my life! Unless it's to regulate behavior that violates my rights."
And that's all it ever needs to be.
Someone smoking pot doesn't violate my rights unless they blow it in my face. Prayer in schools doesn't violate my rights if those schools are private and voluntary and supported by vouchers. Gay marriage doesn't violate my rights because the state has no business licensing marriage in the first place.
Mexicans don't violate my rights until they breed themselves into poverty and destroy their own country and flee into mine in order to commit crimes and vote in our comically fraudulent elections and sign up for welfare and subsidized construction jobs* and free education and pop out a bunch of birth-right citizen anchor-baby future welfare cases.
*thanks Alan Greenspan, you dipshit
Federalism is officially a complete failure.
The day I am forced to get an unconstitutional "biometric ID card" in order not to have my job opportunities, directly subsidized by taxes, government-sponsored monopolies and other expropriated wealth, stolen by an illegal immigrant is the day that it's time to dissolve the federal government and revert it's duties back to states that have some semblance of fiscal responsibility and individual rights.
And I say this of course under the near-universal assumption (by now) that this, along with everything else the US government does, will do absolutely nothing to curb illegal immigration or salvage jobs or benefit Americans and instead will be used simply as another tool of inept government to punish the compliant and reward criminals and cheaters and traitor banks and businesses.
The US is no longer a functional government. It can't regulate borders. It dissolves them and signs them away in supranational treaties. It can't regulate trade or abusive businesses. It supports them and bails them out when they fail. It can't win wars. It can't even define "winning" in terms of the bullshit wars it now engages in. It can't regulate reproduction or resource consumption or immigration or anything that actually affects the long term well-being of it's citizens. All it can do at this point is make token bullshit infringements on the rights of anyone unlucky or stupid enough to get in it's way, accomplishing absolutely nothing save crippling debt increases in the process.
You're just not looking at the problem the right way. This is a simple solution to the problem of "how to get paid every time a poor person takes a dump". It's the pinnacle of capitalist science, really.. a major achievement. It's all downhill from here, folks. This man has successfully applied the razor and blades model to human existence: free human, $0.02 per poop for the rest of his life. Let no one claim that western civilization never accomplished anything.
Obviously I'm not suggesting that that's desirable. I am, however, suggesting that it's better to optimize your business in terms of dollars rather than in terms of time or computational efficiency.
It's both. They're intimately linked. Code that is written "efficiently" is usually impossible to maintain, and thus is inefficient in terms of the "solution". That's the point. The most efficiently written code is the code that you don't write, but you just purchase as a pre-made binary. It's also the code that is completely worthless to you in the long run because it disintermediates you from the ultimate end-beneficiary.
Which is better for any given situation? Obviously some combination of both: code that can be written efficiently while still fitting into the big picture. Saying that you're going to always write the most solution-efficient code from scratch every time is just as foolish as trying to efficiently piece together someone else's code and expecting it to last.
It's the price of 100 computers for every script written by a non-programmer.
Okay, yes I was not entirely clear but I realize this is true based on your example, so I concede that even the best scripting language is no match for a determined idiot. And if you can find enough of said idiots to keep you employed, more power to you. I'm certainly not advocating that scripts created by unskilled users replace the need for legitimate scientific programming.
Really, you think it takes more than one sysadmin to manage 100 servers running "batch scripts" or "perl scripts"?
Where do you work?
In most corporates, just having 1 extra computer will cost as much as that programmer
Or are you just trolling?
A factor of 12 improvement is, in my experience, fairly typical. And, yes, you can maintain 100 computers for the price of a single competent programmer. So, while it's not the best solution, it is certainly a very economical one.
A factor of 1400 improvement, as you claim, is simply ridiculous.
Ah, I see. Technology hoarding rather than physical hoarding. That makes more sense.
There are several arguments against this, but I basically agree that we would be better off if technology were as openly shared as possible.
Hmm, yes. I didn't really mean buying a "new" car. I meant a newer, used one. Another result of improved design processes is that nowadays all the parts on your car tend to fail at around the same time. So, unless your car is relatively new (ie under warranty), making major repairs has become more of a losing proposition.
It is not putting a price on life.
It's merely deciding whether you value quality of life over quantity.
If you're really pissed about this, then you haven't really thought it through.
Natural resources are finite. The supply of human labor is finite. It is impossible to expend infinite amounts of resources extending human life. You've been lied to if you believe you don't have to care about these truths. And if your government is the one who has told you this lie, that just means that they will take on the responsibility of reconciling any disconnect between your perception and reality, by force, whenever necessary.
most people have an instinct for hoarding
I'm curious to know the mechanism by which you, as a physicist, view hoarding as impeding progress.
I will admit that most people do have an instinct for hoarding. But I don't believe the vast majority do anywhere close to an effective job of it. And I don't think that hoarding, per se, should have any negative effect. Rather the opposite, actually.
My own view is that consumption, rather than hoarding, has a long-term deleterious effect on living standards. And that what most people consider "hoarding" is actually consumption. True hoarding would act to preserve resources for future consumption, which would derive more benefit due to advances in technology than current consumption. But I'm interested to hear what others think.
First of all, just taking safety for instance, it's nearly impossible to determine how to solve a safety problem in the "most efficient" way possible. What's the "most efficient" way to build a safe nuclear reactor? Make one that is 100% melt-down proof? You waste nuclear fuel. Make one that is completely incapable of being repurposed for nuclear weapons? You increase cost beyond market feasibility. Don't build nuclear power plants at all? People die from lack of energy. What's the "most efficient" way to build a safe car? What's the "most efficient" way to build a safe bridge? There are simply far too many variables, all interdependent in subtle ways, to consider. Add an extra layer of corrosion allowance, for instance, and you may prevent a bridge from collapsing and save a dozen lives. On the other hand, you may trigger a resource shortage that bankrupts a major company and destroys a thousand. Physical implications are obvious, but software is analogous. Spend ten billion dollars writing the perfect space shuttle control software, and you might save a dozen astronauts. Fail to develop a viable space exploration program in time, and humanity could be wiped out by the next asteroid. You're right, though, those aren't really software problems per se, and should be clearly defined as part of "the problem". Often they aren't.
But, yes, I'm assuming #2. I think it's clear from the GP that this is the manner in which "most efficient" was used.
But my point is also that it's not just the "efficiency" of the program itself or it's maintenance. It's the efficiency of the entire business and how the software fits into it. The cost of software in most business cases is trivial compared to it's benefits. Which, I think, is the reason we see so much software being re-invented over and over again to begin with. What isn't taken into account, though, is the cost of getting software wrong.
But, you realize, that's entirely true. Here's a vaulted car analogy:
American cars were historically bolted together, or welded together from standard parts supplied by thousands of different suppliers. If you wanted to, you can take an old American truck, completely disassemble it, replace almost any piece and re-build it from the ground up. That business model worked when the design costs of a car were vastly greater than the manufacturing costs. By using standard parts, those costs were spread out over many years and many models. Each part was not optimized to each car, but it was cheaper to manufacture and maintain regardless. American car manufacturers stuck with this, due to several factors, even in the face of superior competitors with vastly different processes. We all know how that turned out.
Today, almost every piece of a car is custom-designed, not shared with other models. Robots weld auto bodies into a single piece. People spend more time working in the design phase, not as much in the manufacturing. Trimming excess materials from the design is nearly a science. The cost of repairing or rebuilding a car is prohibitive compared to the cost of simply buying a new one. American car companies that failed to adapt, along with their parts suppliers, are going bankrupt.
Now, is one model superior to the other? No. They each have strengths and weaknesses. Asian workers were not necessarily better-off than American workers, despite their technological advantages. Asian automotive companies evolved in an environment rich in talented labor and poor in natural resources. They used design and lots of mental "work" to conserve natural resources. American automotive companies evolved in the opposite environment, poor in skilled labor and rich in unskilled labor and natural resources. They used natural resources and unskilled labor to make up for lack of skilled design work.
Ideally we would all be best off if we lived in an environment rich in natural resources and talented labor, while still conserving both. Technology, correctly applied, can help us achieve this. But only if the advances of technology are not negated by the proliferation of unskilled labor or wasteful resource consumption.
That's the kind of thinking that leads to batch jobs taking an hour, that should be done in 5 minutes or less.
I've said this before and I'll say it again, because I've created plenty of unoptimized "batch jobs" that take longer than they should.
COMPUTERS ARE CHEAPER THAN HUMANS
A cubicle filled with racks of computers running inefficient batch jobs costs a tiny fraction of a competent person sitting in the same cubicle and optimizing every little thing by hand. And a program written in a high-level language is probably cheaper to maintain over the long run as well.
If my goal is the solve a problem for a customer then I'm going to do that in the most efficient way possible.
I realize you're just tooting your own horn, but you're living in fantasy land if you think this is how it actually works, or even should work. The customer might not even want the "most efficient" thing. They might want an over-engineered thing. They might want the safest thing. They might want the most environmentally responsible thing. They might want the most flexible thing or the most interoperable thing. They might want the thing that works with whatever broken systems they already have. They might want the thing that they can build upon to grow their business in the future. Hell, you might be getting paid by the hour, so your incentive might be to create things in the least efficient, but still passable, way possible.
But it's important not to confuse "an over-engineered thing that is already there and working" with whatever under-engineered thing just happens to be laying around.
DRM, smart-cards, cable/tv access boxes, media players, stolen laptops, etc
Probably not e-commerce servers exactly, but you never know depending on the physical security of your datacenter. And with DRM, of course, the purpose is to lock you out of equipment to which you have physical access.
1) No one's going to be developing anything in 5-10 years. NSA will pull something out of a hat that's been in the works for decades. And it'll probably be exactly what you guessed.
2) "Dealing" with the private sector sounds ominous.
3) This sounds suspiciously like DRM. Oh, you do business with the feds? You'll need to use certified, "trusted" systems that allow NSA to remotely memory-hole anything you're accidentally sent.
4) Next step: Internet user licensing. Say goodbye to anonymity. Three-strikes and your internet access is revoked.