And Darl is in there saying they are just unhappy about the stock price going down.
Getting the words from Bob' mouth makes them only marginally more credible in the context of a public relations nightmare and two ongoing life and death lawsuits. It's not like this is mother Theresa extolling the virtues of personal sacrifice - this is Bob hoping he can buy into the liabiities of others and make legal hay. From such minds rarely springs truth in any recognizable form. This is a chess match and you expect the players to say - "I moved my queen to this corner because it creates an opportunity later to fork the queen with a protected knight?"
I suggest that whatever reason is given - the purpose of the reason given is to distract from the reason itself.
I have suggested the reason is that the risk/reward benefit went south as soon as the code was made public, and nobody cared. Linus said - that's my mistakes from when I was still in diapers. Linus has further said - we will remove that code from linux without even requiring a reboot. And he has pointed out that SCO is arguing about code it licensed (That would be like me suing someone who downloaded sting because I own a legitimate CD). In Short - the public has ruled on SCO and has voted against it. The arguments have been aired, both sides have been heard, and the jury that matters - which is the licensee buying mega-corps have turned in their virdict. If SCO want to appeal this public decsion to the courts it can, but Baystar is pulling out at a time which suggests they are not going to support the continuation of the appeal.
With 300 employees they need 30,000,000 in revenue - they have only 10M or a third of that with no real prospect of tripling it any time soon. So Bob's point that the core business is dead is well taken. However an employee buyout of the assets could yield a job saving bankrupcy - secure the product line for downstream users - but would destroy creditors - which would include BOB.
Bob's only real hope is to seperate the liability from the core business - and the shareholders would be best served by sticking by the IP value - because the UNIX stream can only barely hold its own weight. So Bob's pitch to drop the employees and the UNIX business (into an employee buyout/ banrupcy I would hope) and steam ahead with IP is the stronger of available decisions.
But given the writing on the wall, the best move is to get out and preserve as much capitale as it can now - because as a late creditor, it would otherwise be one of the last in line at the asset auction.
I would propose the army build a virtual sandbox in which to run applications safely - in the sandbox - external requests go through a mother-may-i query in which a real user - or a centralized database is queried as to the permissabiity of (deleting the file "some file x") etc. Once the application has run for a period of time under scrutiny - the repetitious requests can be quashed, and only new requests for external data raise flags - managing a list of valid external requests should be much more practical than line by line audits for buffer overrun opportunities on a billion lines of code.
When you want out of a deal - you rarely say "I want out because I found a prettier women to spend my time with." You generally say - you've stopped doing your part of the deal - so I want out, and pray like hell nobodyy figures out the real reason.
I'm not saying you're wrong about motives - but what people say are the motives and the motives are disticts. In this case - actions speak volumes, the words mere wallpaper.
Since BS is essentially bankrolling a luxurious experiment by a few well paid lawyers - it seems that for its part - it would rather have the money back than continue to invest in the salaried of attorneys - which can only mean that it doesn't think the risk/reward ratio is positive any longer.
A strange because it suggests that the business model really was FUD - that they didn't have a leg to stand on - but they could threaten in the hopes of creating an avalanche of copitulation (large firms signing up for licenses) If this had happened prior to court - the case could have been dragged out - while the revenue came in. Clearly MS was willing to lower some of the risk by cost sharing - but from where I sit - they don't have any more of a case than they can make - and there will likely be no more response to identified code - than removing it - and since it is clear now that no-one has acted intentionally - the reality of huge punative awards is unrealistic.
Kudos to OS for dodging the biggest bullet to date - I doubt there are any more of greater significance looming on the horizon - the other legal accomplishment would be to uphold the GPL without frightening the world that OS is similar to the RIAA.
However, that's not reality. There are plenty of people who want kids for reasons that have nothing to do with preserving society.
While I understand that in an overpopulated planet - and there is no one more opinionated about making some pay for the overpopulation of others (allowing jobs to be expatriated to china for exampe is a way of making a conservative society pay for the overpopulation of china)
The point which is relevant is the children are a necessary part of society - just like food is necessary to an obese person - you cannot create a reality in which obesity justifies a lower quality of food.
It is certainly in the interest of society for children to have quality time with their parents - this time must be deducted from the availabke work week - and if society allows the work week to be as long as the market will bear - the market will put negative pressure on childrens time with parents - rather than distribute the available work more evenly amongst the available workers.
ironically Karl Marx made quite a study of work weeks in a capatilistic system and he realized that 1. capitalists have the power 2. workers will do whatever is necessary to eat, and that if the game were played with simple rules, capitalists would keep for themselves all the value over and above the minimum required for life. He suggested that competition in short creates an insatible demand for work, and that extra and redundant work would eat all the available time until the workers were working and never finishing their work (because other workers would render it obsolete).
In a command economy - a single decision would lead to a singular solution which would be emplemented over and over in exactly the same way and would not be rendered moot by competition.
Unfortunately, this world IS competative, and an isolated anomoly is difficult to sustain. Russia managed but it did not compare favorably to a more natural counterpart, and in the end, simply failed to win the global competition.
Society has to replace itself - the alternate reality in which societies do not replace themselves is extinct.
The purpose of sucessful goovernments is to provide an atmosphere in which preservation is optimized.
over population of poor people is not optimization for preservation because it leads to turmoil and conflict and loss in the broader conflict - so your point - perhaps unsaid - that encouraging population is not in the interest of the people has merit - but it is a nonlinearity. Population is good to a point - but present parents are very important and a restricted work week yields children with emotional attachments to a prior generation - which yields in turn stability - the essetial ingriendent of civilization.
AIK
Re:For those who wonder why no/. cache...
on
HDD Assault Cannon
·
· Score: 1
To make everyone happy - Slashdot could (whilst generating a page - look to see if its own copy of m_LastTimePageWasChecked(url) is greater than 10 minutes and if so then test the server to see if it is slashdotted and update cache if at all possible. Otherwise see if m_PageIsSlashdotted(url) is true, and if it is then:
1. increment the m_PublishedCopyCounter(url) 2. serve the cache
for a period of time thereafter tranfer the hitcount of the cache to the target site by sending request some number of times n where n is equal to m_PublishedCopyCounter(url).
This will effectively loadbalance the target site - credit the site with all hits if possible (with an optout page and a statistics page for small sites who can't afford the bandwidth and may never recover)
Overtime is an incentive for employers to HIRE people rather than working the one's they have to death.
It is incentive which recognizes that the market if left to itself will gobble up all the dedicated people who don't have kids and can work weekends and evenings and leave the people who carry the real burden of society (yes parenthood) unemployed.
Where there is no negative pressure on expliotation - people will sign up for expliotation rather than get left behind and starve - that is a comment on world experience over time - your mileage may vary (but not by much)
Given that kites have been a part of our harnessing of power going back a few milenii Why don't we see kites used to power our homes.
They are inexpensive.
Unlike solar cells which do not generate more power in their lifetime than it takes to produce them - kites could actually net energy.
The kite should be made with adjustable pitch, and should be oscillated in an out with the lift used to pull and spin a flywheel attached to a generator.
serious kites in high winds could harness many megawatts of free energy - at much lower cost and higher energy per hectare rates than windmills. - But I want to know why it won't work.
It is the governments job because any private effort to resolve the tradgedy of the commons - or market externalities disadvantages those who elect not to exploit a permitted opportunity.
Politicians.
Howard Dean's Campaign could be a sea change with regard to how politicians are funded.
Remember he collected small bills from huge numbers - that - regardless of anything else about Howard - is an encredibly good thing.
Importation and exploitation create exaggerated concentrations of wealth - which is where Bush will get most of his money. - So it is easy to deduce that the democratisation of Campaign funding will improve the incentives for politics to promote the interests of the masses.
Protectionism allows ford to build a plant and pay his workers enough to buy the product. Ford can only trade with companies who include enough compensation to produce consumers and products at an equal rate.
Said simoply - that is the goal of government in economics put simpley:
Ensure that companies produce consumers and products in equal measure.
Foriegn countries need to be brought into a healthy market under rules of engagement which continue to produce consumers and products equally. Allowing them to enter on one side violated the ford principle, and should not be tolerated by a healthy market.
I think solutions fail because they are too specific, and they are written to solve problems from the customer's point of view.
The customer is usually unsophisticated, and says, I want to keep track of sales by quarter. So the project sets out to meet that objective - instead of realizing that a simple OLAP cube will provide a browsable view of the companies operation by any degree of granularity - emplementing that solution has real value - whereas emplementing the poorly expressed goals of the customers may fall short in the real-world.
One thing to note is that the pace of change is itself changing - market competativeness doesn't allow for responsive businesses - it require proactive businesses, business which realize that with 10% more effort on this project will yield 10 fold results later on.
For example - we use a lot of templates - so the art department creates a template with a calender - by the time its ready - the season is just about over - I insist that the art department produce three years of calanders with the same design - now in the five seconds it takes to change the date and rerun the "create month layout" we have three years of templates rather than three months.
If you get laid off because of outsourcing - you should consider contributing your industrail knowledge to the Open Source community. Make the effort to start a competative open source project in that field.
I remember working at a shop in which we rewrote the same code until we couldn't see straight.
I wrote a CASE (computer aided software engineering) tool - in Access which could spit out the basic form of any of our two hundred forms in seconds.
Then I wrote a generic middle tier which was data driven and could replace any of a number of middle tiers (It was basically a relational database tier which supported foriegn key drop down boxes and event driven queries on same, with support for updateable tables in a multidimensional security context.)
The point is - a few days work on a general solution can replace years of man hours on specific close minded - manager dictated code.
I think that many outsourcing projects will end up on the dunghill of code because the real cost of software is maintanance - and elegance is everything when it comes to maintainance.
See Henry Ford had more than a car company - he had a complete economic system.
But he also had a monopoly. Meaning his workers couldn't get a car anywhere else. Now imagine one evil employee sneeks the blueprints out the back door, sails away to singapore and builds a factory which DOES NOT pay workers enough to buy the product of their labour. Then he put these less expensive cars on a ship and brings them back to the ford motor company and sells them to the employees of ford at a slightly lower price than the ford vehicle. The Ford employees realizing this is a threat to their good_thing (tm) start a campaign of slogans - buy only ford which they chant on their way into work. However, on their way home, they secretly purchase the foriegn car - because it is after all cheaper.
The guy who gets rich in this picture is the importer.
Ford loses. Ford's employees lose. The foriegn workers are exploited - but benefit to a lesser degree.
The complete economy ford created is no longer a complete economy - it now experiences "market externalities". So Ford can not longer justify paying his workers to consume the product - he can only afford to pay the price below which even foriegn workers will refuse to work.
The foriegn workers get screwed because they could have had a suffecient economy of their own.
People need to learn how to require market externalities to be required to net positive effects on both sides.
And if you go to school now, you can be in the prime of your career 20 years from now when the baby boom busts and you find the unemployment line at the pediatric unit wraps around the block.
The problem is no that Indians are entering our Job market - the problem is the Balance of jobs is shifting.
It is the duty of government to insure balance - because individuals simply cannot effect change. Slogans only whitewash the problem - and the truth is most "buy american" bumper stickers are printed in taiwan.
The real goal should be to figure out how American Investment in India can create More Total Jobs and it would help immensly if the Indians were consumers in the new market as well as producers.
There is this potential upside - that decreasing the cost of some IT will create higher returns on information - and might result in smaller businesses making investments in more software than MSoffice.
This in turn could create a huge army of domestic IT workers to service a larger pie of demand - if the value is higher - the profit and demand will be high as well - and wages will reflect this.
Even as a paid programmer - I can see a future in which Open Source offsets outsourcing.
First of all - Indians simply don't pay for development software. American companies probably do - and as a result, the cost of proprietary software is felt disporportionately in countries with enforcement differentials.
Open Source lowers the cost and value of software writing and shifts the value to presence, service, business models, data, access, an installation - most of which are not telepresence suceptable.
I believe the solution is to experience a productivity revolution in education.
We need to be able to have 50 students per teacher instead of 25.
I actually believe this is possible.
When I went to primary school - I spent several years in an "individual course program."
This is less than ideal - but it shows that it can be done.
With intelligent and responsive algorithms for presenting students with information, and engaging environments like this one - in which peers are trading information and learning without a "teacher" we should be able to see real gains in education productivity.
Perhaps we already have.
Perhaps the masses of "uneducated" programmers really represent the paradigm of a massive increase in education productivity in which some have simply taught each oethr and themselves through the free exchange of ideas, and the widespread availability of the "factors of productions."
There are other fields - such as medicine and law, which have not experienced a rush of zero-cost education, and this might be better explored.
Take Medicine for example:
We assume that taking someone's pulse is a. important and b. objective. therefore we hire people who are trusted and competant. In actuality we have little basis for determining their competancy exept that their parents were rich enough to pay for the beer kegs at harvard.
More on a meritocracy for medicine and law later . ..
While I agree they are doing a lousy job keepy jobs here - there are significant differences between letting textiles go overseas and letting software development go.
a person who works 12 hours a day all their life making tee shirts is not likely to ever use that skill as a threat.
The same is not true of software. That skill accumulating in a foriegn country poses a serious threat when combined with widespread religious fanaticism.
It amounts to a transfer of wealth and knowledge - which taken together is a substantial amount of power. In the wrong hands a very_bad_idea (TM).
Which means that at some point the politicians who allowed textiles to leave town, may balk at contemporary skills migration.
one can hope.
Here's an irony. I think the US should raise barriors to outsourcing - if they don't I may want to take advantage of some outsourcing in order to stay competative in a market I find stategically less than optimal.
Granting some compromise on your point about technology coming before family size reduction. I see some of that but I also see alternative forms of risk. I see taking a boat to America, or a Wagon ride out west as very high risk - usually correlated with lower degrees of access to females and having little at all to do with technology. I think these modes of risk came before technology and seperate the immigrant experience from the romanticized native experience.
Look at the corrolation between the emphasis put on settling down - vs. accomplishing something BEFORE settling down.
Cultures (The South, Mexico, China) with strong cultural bias toward starting a family early correlate highly with low wages, low SOL, low rates of education.
I'm not making a moral statement regarding the rights of white people to win at the contest of exploring and surviving the inevitable conflicts of population growth circa 1700.
I am suggesting a losing stategy however which is to turn over all the jobs to places in the world which have already lost the standard of living contest.
America was the premier leader of individualism and democracy - any economic success in western countries owes at least the tip of a hat to the American revolution - as we owe the Greeks a tip of the hat for their similar role model in an earlier time.
The point you miss is that you cannot raise the standard of living any higher than the point at which a culture will simply have more kids. If the absence of food is the only barrior to population growth - you cannot change the standard of living. Thats simple math.
There is no way we can raise the standard for living IF the the higher availability of food, shelter, and medicine is immediately reflected in higher rate of population growth. Go home, calm down, dig up the math books, and see the chapter 2 + 2 = 4. after ranting about how all the people who think 2 and 2 is 4 are full of bullsh*t then turn off post anonymously and come back to the party.
The world can sustain a standard of living only when and if the growth of resources >= growth of population.
You talk about a rich chinese past - thats whats bullsh*t. every culture has left some mark which taken alone may suggest achievemant - but I suggest there is no period in history in which the average chinese was anything more than a subsistance rice farmer. The story of America is not just that Bill Gates owns more than God - but that the average citizen - for the first time in history - is something more than a subsistence farmer.
Under the logic of the selfish gene we realize that Darwinian bets are not so often made by complex organisms such as persons, and certainly not by super complex organisms such as cultures, but by individuals traits and practices. The trait of using any downtime between subsistence farming to make more kids is a highly competative trait, and families which practiced less optimizes routines are not highly represented in the current chinese gene pool.
In the US however, there were other ways to compete - move west - rob a bank - learn a skill - invent electricity. This has lead to a more diverse representation of competative traits.
The question is the value of life. Anyone who suggests that the parent who loses one of their sixteen kids has suffered the same loss as the parent who loses an only child is kidding themselves. Our egalitarian - all men are created equal - mantra prevents us from considering that in a darwinian framework, we divide our parenting resources INTO the number of kids we produce. We divide their education, their healthcare, their seed capital and the world opportunity we have created for them.
This division leads to lower standard of living.
now divide by 16 for a thousand generations and surprise yourself by the poverty you've created. - go figure.
1. Market Externality - ealier referred to as "tragedy of the commons." As specifically applied to outsourcing - it means the outsourcing company gets 100% of the benefit of the lower costs while SHARING the penalty of a poorer market.
2. Education. - Again right - but a chicken and egg problem. We may be losing jobs primarily because we allowed our schools to stagnate. The relative cost per competative graduate has been going up in this country and down in others as other countries have sent the brightest here to study and have now seeded competent universities at home - presumably without unions, and no child left behind restrictions - other countries have set their goal as the highest number of competative graduates - not the least number of illiterates. (think about the difference in creating a competative nation)
We have experienced ZERO innovations in education. The last 50 years amount to phychological experimentation. We are still grading tests manually. We have ZERO idea about how well any given teacher can teach. And in spite of a computer revolution, the productivity of education system hasn't moved one percentage point. The fact is we don't even know how to measure teacher productivity.
3. Loans for Tax cuts to stimulate the Chinese Economy. That should be the economic slogan for the anti-bush vote. Because I believe that is precisely what happened. If that tax had merely been shifted from income tax to consumption tax - we would have stimulated production in this country and discouraged consumption of foriegn made goods at the same time.
4. New Social Contract that's what you're asking for - I believe the answer is more localized money. The transaction of money which can move outside the context of the social contract is a violation of the contract.
We have a contract now which says we will work and pay taxes to government, AND IN TURN THEY will support us by providing a safety net, and insuring the general welfare. Permitting our money to go outside the contract where they cannot use it for the purpose of the contract voids the contract - and if you don't believe me - ask where social security went - It was made out to china on a walmart cheque.
Slashdot Mirror
And Darl is in there saying they are just unhappy about the stock price going down.
Getting the words from Bob' mouth makes them only marginally more credible in the context of a public relations nightmare and two ongoing life and death lawsuits. It's not like this is mother Theresa extolling the virtues of personal sacrifice - this is Bob hoping he can buy into the liabiities of others and make legal hay. From such minds rarely springs truth in any recognizable form. This is a chess match and you expect the players to say - "I moved my queen to this corner because it creates an opportunity later to fork the queen with a protected knight?"
I suggest that whatever reason is given - the purpose of the reason given is to distract from the reason itself.
I have suggested the reason is that the risk/reward benefit went south as soon as the code was made public, and nobody cared. Linus said - that's my mistakes from when I was still in diapers. Linus has further said - we will remove that code from linux without even requiring a reboot. And he has pointed out that SCO is arguing about code it licensed (That would be like me suing someone who downloaded sting because I own a legitimate CD). In Short - the public has ruled on SCO and has voted against it. The arguments have been aired, both sides have been heard, and the jury that matters - which is the licensee buying mega-corps have turned in their virdict. If SCO want to appeal this public decsion to the courts it can, but Baystar is pulling out at a time which suggests they are not going to support the continuation of the appeal.
With 300 employees they need 30,000,000 in revenue - they have only 10M or a third of that with no real prospect of tripling it any time soon. So Bob's point that the core business is dead is well taken. However an employee buyout of the assets could yield a job saving bankrupcy - secure the product line for downstream users - but would destroy creditors - which would include BOB.
Bob's only real hope is to seperate the liability from the core business - and the shareholders would be best served by sticking by the IP value - because the UNIX stream can only barely hold its own weight. So Bob's pitch to drop the employees and the UNIX business (into an employee buyout/ banrupcy I would hope) and steam ahead with IP is the stronger of available decisions.
But given the writing on the wall, the best move is to get out and preserve as much capitale as it can now - because as a late creditor, it would otherwise be one of the last in line at the asset auction.
AIK
I would propose the army build a virtual sandbox in which to run applications safely - in the sandbox - external requests go through a mother-may-i query in which a real user - or a centralized database is queried as to the permissabiity of (deleting the file "some file x") etc. Once the application has run for a period of time under scrutiny - the repetitious requests can be quashed, and only new requests for external data raise flags - managing a list of valid external requests should be much more practical than line by line audits for buffer overrun opportunities on a billion lines of code.
my 2c
AIK
When you want out of a deal - you rarely say "I want out because I found a prettier women to spend my time with." You generally say - you've stopped doing your part of the deal - so I want out, and pray like hell nobodyy figures out the real reason.
I'm not saying you're wrong about motives - but what people say are the motives and the motives are disticts. In this case - actions speak volumes, the words mere wallpaper.
AIK
Since BS is essentially bankrolling a luxurious experiment by a few well paid lawyers - it seems that for its part - it would rather have the money back than continue to invest in the salaried of attorneys - which can only mean that it doesn't think the risk/reward ratio is positive any longer.
A strange because it suggests that the business model really was FUD - that they didn't have a leg to stand on - but they could threaten in the hopes of creating an avalanche of copitulation (large firms signing up for licenses) If this had happened prior to court - the case could have been dragged out - while the revenue came in. Clearly MS was willing to lower some of the risk by cost sharing - but from where I sit - they don't have any more of a case than they can make - and there will likely be no more response to identified code - than removing it - and since it is clear now that no-one has acted intentionally - the reality of huge punative awards is unrealistic.
Kudos to OS for dodging the biggest bullet to date - I doubt there are any more of greater significance looming on the horizon - the other legal accomplishment would be to uphold the GPL without frightening the world that OS is similar to the RIAA.
AIK
Video rippers will appear to complement the current generation
of audio rippers.
And Tivo is a what?
AIK
However, that's not reality. There are plenty of people who want kids for reasons that have nothing to do with preserving society.
While I understand that in an overpopulated planet - and there is no one more opinionated about making some pay for the overpopulation of others (allowing jobs to be expatriated to china for exampe is a way of making a conservative society pay for the overpopulation of china)
The point which is relevant is the children are a necessary part of society - just like food is necessary to an obese person - you cannot create a reality in which obesity justifies a lower quality of food.
It is certainly in the interest of society for children to have quality time with their parents - this time must be deducted from the availabke work week - and if society allows the work week to be as long as the market will bear - the market will put negative pressure on childrens time with parents - rather than distribute the available work more evenly amongst the available workers.
ironically Karl Marx made quite a study of work weeks in a capatilistic system and he realized that 1. capitalists have the power 2. workers will do whatever is necessary to eat, and that if the game were played with simple rules, capitalists would keep for themselves all the value over and above the minimum required for life. He suggested that competition in short creates an insatible demand for work, and that extra and redundant work would eat all the available time until the workers were working and never finishing their work (because other workers would render it obsolete).
In a command economy - a single decision would lead to a singular solution which would be emplemented over and over in exactly the same way and would not be rendered moot by competition.
Unfortunately, this world IS competative, and an isolated anomoly is difficult to sustain. Russia managed but it did not compare favorably to a more natural counterpart, and in the end, simply failed to win the global competition.
AIK
Burden is not truly chosen.
Society has to replace itself - the alternate reality in which societies do not replace themselves is extinct.
The purpose of sucessful goovernments is to provide an atmosphere in which preservation is optimized.
over population of poor people is not optimization for preservation because it leads to turmoil and conflict and loss in the broader conflict - so your point - perhaps unsaid - that encouraging population is not in the interest of the people has merit - but it is a nonlinearity. Population is good to a point - but present parents are very important and a restricted work week yields children with emotional attachments to a prior generation - which yields in turn stability - the essetial ingriendent of civilization.
AIK
To make everyone happy - Slashdot could (whilst generating a page - look to see if its own copy
of m_LastTimePageWasChecked(url) is greater than 10 minutes and if so then test the server to see if it is slashdotted and update cache if at all possible. Otherwise see if m_PageIsSlashdotted(url) is true, and if it is then:
1. increment the m_PublishedCopyCounter(url)
2. serve the cache
for a period of time thereafter tranfer the hitcount of the cache to the target site by sending request some number of times n where n is equal to m_PublishedCopyCounter(url).
This will effectively loadbalance the target site - credit the site with all hits if possible (with an optout page and a statistics page for small sites who can't afford the bandwidth and may never recover)
AIK
Very likely yes - and very likely you can request any unpaid outstanding - if you can prove it exists.
AIK
Not entirely,
Overtime is an incentive for employers to HIRE people rather than working the one's they have to death.
It is incentive which recognizes that the market if left to itself will gobble up all the dedicated people who don't have kids and can work weekends and evenings and leave the people who carry the real burden of society (yes parenthood) unemployed.
Where there is no negative pressure on expliotation - people will sign up for expliotation rather than get left behind and starve - that is a comment on world experience over time - your mileage may vary (but not by much)
AIK
We're building airplanes that fly themselves now - why not kites?
When considered kites are usually envisioned on isolated coasts, boats, in short in a clear space.
But I see their earliest potential in developing countries where they do not compete with coal or wires.
AIK
Given that kites have been a part of our harnessing of power going back a few milenii Why don't we see kites used to power our homes.
They are inexpensive.
Unlike solar cells which do not generate more power in their lifetime than it takes to produce them - kites could actually net energy.
The kite should be made with adjustable pitch, and should be oscillated in an out with the lift used to pull and spin a flywheel attached to a generator.
serious kites in high winds could harness many megawatts of free energy - at much lower cost and higher energy per hectare rates than windmills. - But I want to know why it won't work.
AIK
It is the governments job because any private effort to resolve the tradgedy of the commons - or market externalities disadvantages those who elect not to exploit a permitted opportunity.
Politicians.
Howard Dean's Campaign could be a sea change with regard to how politicians are funded.
Remember he collected small bills from huge numbers - that - regardless of anything else about Howard - is an encredibly good thing.
Importation and exploitation create exaggerated concentrations of wealth - which is where Bush will get most of his money. - So it is easy to deduce that the democratisation of Campaign funding will improve the incentives for politics to promote the interests of the masses.
Protectionism allows ford to build a plant and pay his workers enough to buy the product. Ford can only trade with companies who include enough compensation to produce consumers and products at an equal rate.
Said simoply - that is the goal of government in economics put simpley:
Ensure that companies produce consumers and products in equal measure.
Foriegn countries need to be brought into a healthy market under rules of engagement which continue to produce consumers and products equally. Allowing them to enter on one side violated the ford principle, and should not be tolerated by a healthy market.
AIK
AIK
I think solutions fail because they are too specific, and they are written to solve problems from the customer's point of view.
The customer is usually unsophisticated, and says, I want to keep track of sales by quarter. So the project sets out to meet that objective - instead of realizing that a simple OLAP cube will provide a browsable view of the companies operation by any degree of granularity - emplementing that solution has real value - whereas emplementing the poorly expressed goals of the customers may fall short in the real-world.
One thing to note is that the pace of change is itself changing - market competativeness doesn't allow for responsive businesses - it require proactive businesses, business which realize that with 10% more effort on this project will yield 10 fold results later on.
For example - we use a lot of templates - so the art department creates a template with a calender - by the time its ready - the season is just about over - I insist that the art department produce three years of calanders with the same design - now in the five seconds it takes to change the date and rerun the "create month layout" we have three years of templates rather than three months.
AIK
If you get laid off because of outsourcing - you should consider contributing your industrail knowledge to the Open Source community. Make the effort to start a competative open source project in that field.
I remember working at a shop in which we rewrote the same code until we couldn't see straight.
I wrote a CASE (computer aided software engineering) tool - in Access which could spit out the basic form of any of our two hundred forms in seconds.
Then I wrote a generic middle tier which was data driven and could replace any of a number of middle tiers (It was basically a relational database tier which supported foriegn key drop down boxes and event driven queries on same, with support for updateable tables in a multidimensional security context.)
The point is - a few days work on a general solution can replace years of man hours on specific close minded - manager dictated code.
I think that many outsourcing projects will end up on the dunghill of code because the real cost of software is maintanance - and elegance is everything when it comes to maintainance.
AIK
Yeah Henry Ford really had that thing right.
See Henry Ford had more than a car company - he had a complete economic system.
But he also had a monopoly. Meaning his workers couldn't get a car anywhere else. Now imagine one evil employee sneeks the blueprints out the back door, sails away to singapore and builds a factory which DOES NOT pay workers enough to buy the product of their labour. Then he put these less expensive cars on a ship and brings them back to the ford motor company and sells them to the employees of ford at a slightly lower price than the ford vehicle. The Ford employees realizing this is a threat to their good_thing (tm) start a campaign of slogans - buy only ford which they chant on their way into work. However, on their way home, they secretly purchase the foriegn car - because it is after all cheaper.
The guy who gets rich in this picture is the importer.
Ford loses.
Ford's employees lose.
The foriegn workers are exploited - but benefit to a lesser degree.
The complete economy ford created is no longer a complete economy - it now experiences "market externalities". So Ford can not longer justify paying his workers to consume the product - he can only afford to pay the price below which even foriegn workers will refuse to work.
The foriegn workers get screwed because they could have had a suffecient economy of their own.
People need to learn how to require market externalities to be required to net positive effects on both sides.
AIK
And if you go to school now, you can be in the prime of your career 20 years from now when the baby boom busts and you find the unemployment line at the pediatric unit wraps around the block.
The problem is no that Indians are entering our Job market - the problem is the Balance of jobs is shifting.
It is the duty of government to insure balance - because individuals simply cannot effect change. Slogans only whitewash the problem - and the truth is most "buy american" bumper stickers are printed in taiwan.
The real goal should be to figure out how American Investment in India can create More Total Jobs and it would help immensly if the Indians were consumers in the new market as well as producers.
AIK
There is this potential upside - that decreasing the cost of some IT will create higher returns on information - and might result in smaller businesses making investments in more software than MSoffice.
This in turn could create a huge army of domestic IT workers to service a larger pie of demand - if the value is higher - the profit and demand will be high as well - and wages will reflect this.
AIK
There's an irony.
I don't usually blindly promote Open Source.
Even as a paid programmer - I can see a future in which Open Source offsets outsourcing.
First of all - Indians simply don't pay for development software. American companies probably do - and as a result, the cost of proprietary software is felt disporportionately in countries with enforcement differentials.
Open Source lowers the cost and value of software writing and shifts the value to presence, service, business models, data, access, an installation - most of which are not telepresence suceptable.
AIK
I believe the solution is to experience a productivity revolution in education.
.
We need to be able to have 50 students per teacher instead of 25.
I actually believe this is possible.
When I went to primary school - I spent several years in an "individual course program."
This is less than ideal - but it shows that it can be done.
With intelligent and responsive algorithms for presenting students with information, and engaging environments like this one - in which peers are trading information and learning without a "teacher" we should be able to see real gains in education productivity.
Perhaps we already have.
Perhaps the masses of "uneducated" programmers really represent the paradigm of a massive increase in education productivity in which some have simply taught each oethr and themselves through the free exchange of ideas, and the widespread availability of the "factors of productions."
There are other fields - such as medicine and law, which have not experienced a rush of zero-cost education, and this might be better explored.
Take Medicine for example:
We assume that taking someone's pulse is a. important and b. objective. therefore we hire people who are trusted and competant. In actuality we have little basis for determining their competancy exept that their parents were rich enough to pay for the beer kegs at harvard.
More on a meritocracy for medicine and law later . .
AIK
As for 2.
While I agree they are doing a lousy job keepy jobs here - there are significant differences between letting textiles go overseas and letting software development go.
a person who works 12 hours a day all their life making tee shirts is not likely to ever use that skill as a threat.
The same is not true of software. That skill accumulating in a foriegn country poses a serious threat when combined with widespread religious fanaticism.
It amounts to a transfer of wealth and knowledge - which taken together is a substantial amount of power. In the wrong hands a very_bad_idea (TM).
Which means that at some point the politicians who allowed textiles to leave town, may balk at contemporary skills migration.
one can hope.
Here's an irony. I think the US should raise barriors to outsourcing - if they don't I may want to take advantage of some outsourcing in order to stay competative in a market I find stategically less than optimal.
AIK
Didn't get spanked.
Granting some compromise on your point about technology coming before family size reduction. I see some of that but I also see alternative forms of risk. I see taking a boat to America, or a Wagon ride out west as very high risk - usually correlated with lower degrees of access to females and having little at all to do with technology. I think these modes of risk came before technology and seperate the immigrant experience from the romanticized native experience.
Look at the corrolation between the emphasis put on settling down - vs. accomplishing something BEFORE settling down.
Cultures (The South, Mexico, China) with strong cultural bias toward starting a family early correlate highly with low wages, low SOL, low rates of education.
I'm not making a moral statement regarding the rights of white people to win at the contest of exploring and surviving the inevitable conflicts of population growth circa 1700.
I am suggesting a losing stategy however which is to turn over all the jobs to places in the world which have already lost the standard of living contest.
America was the premier leader of individualism and democracy - any economic success in western countries owes at least the tip of a hat to the American revolution - as we owe the Greeks a tip of the hat for their similar role model in an earlier time.
The point you miss is that you cannot raise the standard of living any higher than the point at which a culture will simply have more kids. If the absence of food is the only barrior to population growth - you cannot change the standard of living. Thats simple math.
AIK
There is no way we can raise the standard for living IF the the higher availability of food, shelter, and medicine is immediately reflected in higher rate of population growth. Go home, calm down, dig up the math books, and see the chapter 2 + 2 = 4. after ranting about how all the people who think 2 and 2 is 4 are full of bullsh*t then turn off post anonymously and come back to the party.
The world can sustain a standard of living only when and if the growth of resources >= growth of population.
You talk about a rich chinese past - thats whats bullsh*t. every culture has left some mark which taken alone may suggest achievemant - but I suggest there is no period in history in which the average chinese was anything more than a subsistance rice farmer. The story of America is not just that Bill Gates owns more than God - but that the average citizen - for the first time in history - is something more than a subsistence farmer.
Under the logic of the selfish gene we realize that Darwinian bets are not so often made by complex organisms such as persons, and certainly not by super complex organisms such as cultures, but by individuals traits and practices. The trait of using any downtime between subsistence farming to make more kids is a highly competative trait, and families which practiced less optimizes routines are not highly represented in the current chinese gene pool.
In the US however, there were other ways to compete - move west - rob a bank - learn a skill - invent electricity. This has lead to a more diverse representation of competative traits.
The question is the value of life. Anyone who suggests that the parent who loses one of their sixteen kids has suffered the same loss as the parent who loses an only child is kidding themselves. Our egalitarian - all men are created equal - mantra prevents us from considering that in a darwinian framework, we divide our parenting resources INTO the number of kids we produce. We divide their education, their healthcare, their seed capital and the world opportunity we have created for them.
This division leads to lower standard of living.
now divide by 16 for a thousand generations and surprise yourself by the poverty you've created. - go figure.
AIK
1. Market Externality - ealier referred to as "tragedy of the commons." As specifically applied to outsourcing - it means the outsourcing company gets 100% of the benefit of the lower costs while SHARING the penalty of a poorer market.
2. Education. - Again right - but a chicken and egg problem. We may be losing jobs primarily because we allowed our schools to stagnate. The relative cost per competative graduate has been going up in this country and down in others as other countries have sent the brightest here to study and have now seeded competent universities at home - presumably without unions, and no child left behind restrictions - other countries have set their goal as the highest number of competative graduates - not the least number of illiterates. (think about the difference in creating a competative nation)
We have experienced ZERO innovations in education.
The last 50 years amount to phychological experimentation. We are still grading tests manually. We have ZERO idea about how well any given teacher can teach. And in spite of a computer revolution, the productivity of education system hasn't moved one percentage point. The fact is we don't even know how to measure teacher productivity.
3. Loans for Tax cuts to stimulate the Chinese Economy. That should be the economic slogan for the anti-bush vote. Because I believe that is precisely what happened. If that tax had merely been shifted from income tax to consumption tax - we would have stimulated production in this country and discouraged consumption of foriegn made goods at the same time.
4. New Social Contract
that's what you're asking for - I believe the answer is more localized money. The transaction of money which can move outside the context of the social contract is a violation of the contract.
We have a contract now which says we will work and pay taxes to government, AND IN TURN THEY will support us by providing a safety net, and insuring the general welfare. Permitting our money to go outside the contract where they cannot use it for the purpose of the contract voids the contract - and if you don't believe me - ask where social security went - It was made out to china on a walmart cheque.
AIK