Racism (and sexism, etc.) is about power. It's about a group of privileged people using power to keep their privilege and the expense of another group. The emphasis matters. Racism essentially has nothing to do with individuals, individual thought or individual action. Bigotry is abhorrent, but in the end it doesn't oppress people. Public policy that consistently advantages one group over another does. We have structures of racism all over the place in the U.S. and it's been going on since before this country was founded. john powell at the Kirwin Institute has many insightful and helpful papers and presentations about structural racialization (his preferred term since "racism" has essentially been co-opted to the point of meaninglessness).
No, lawsuits affect the cost of health care very little (around 3% of the cost is due to lawsuits, as I recall). The overhead of private insurance is a major cost driver (all that paperwork to deny claims costs money!) as is a crapload of redundant technology (why do two clinics a block away both have MRI machines?). The private insurance industry has 10x the overhead costs of Medicare/Medicaid. The U.S. system is broken because we pay through the nose so private hospitals and clinics can "compete" with each other (i.e. buy the latest gadgets so they can market them) and so that insurance companies can pay for advertisements, lawyers and underwriters.
but most of those diseases are probably preventable by good nutrition and good lifestyle choices.
False. Personal behavior is only a small factor in health according to CDC research. The vast majority of your health is affected by things like the kind of environment you live in (do your have parks? Do you live near a freeway and pollution? and so on).
Dr. Anthony Iton and colleagues from Alameda County, CA cite research (longer presentation here) that indicates genes and access to health care account for about 30% of health outcomes. Wealth has a large impact on health outcomes. Essentially, poor health is more a problem of disparity and discrimination than anything else.
except that cutting taxes would been FAR better for the economy and employment.
How so? Trickle-down economics has been thoroughly debunked. Not once has cutting taxes spurred any economic activity. All that cutting taxes does is continue to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich, because guess who benefits most from tax cuts? It's a double whammy of the rich paying less into the commonwealth and cutting services to the very people who need them the most.
Well, she had relationships with people from doing work in her former position. It helps when you know most of people in the group you're transferring to. I think she may have taken some training courses at company expense, but I'm not sure. The most important thing is that she worked for a company and management that let her try.
Fifty years ago a single income household was the norm, and there were two cars in the garage, appliances in the house, and a far larger proportion of savings in the bank. The government paid down our WWII debt, and we basically financed the all of the Allies, among whom only Finland paid off its debt, in less than a decade.
And do you know how we did that? Do you know what the top income tax rate was in 1953, the first year of Ike's presidency? 92%
.
We've declined as a society primarily because we stopped investing in the common good. One can't go from a tax rate of 92% to a tax rate of 35% without seriously eroding the common good. It's the common good that drives prosperity because it is investment in these things that are the building blocks of a strong economy.
No, it's not the same at all. The people who accept scientific consensus on climate change are backed up by research. That's not the same as blind faith leading to monoculture and non-acceptance of contrary ideas. It's up to the deniers to prove the research is wrong and to this date, they haven't.
This is much too limiting. Changing careers can be a wonderful thing for people. I know someone who had no technical background and went from managing developers to being a developer and it was a great change for her. She found work to be more interesting, the problems challenging and finding solutions gave her a sense of accomplishment. In other words, a career change was much more fulfilling than simply sticking with what she knew.
have not ceded it, it has been taken.
[...]
If you believe that, then what you consider "good" I likely consider "evil".
Maybe, I don't know. If so, I'm perfectly content with you continuing to play the victim. If not, then it's time to get off the couch and do some work.
No. This statement displays a complete lack of understanding of what racism and sexism are. They are not about differences. They are about power. They are about one group of privileged people wielding power over another in order to keep their privilege. They are not about individual thoughts, opinions or actions. They are about systemic and institutional bias. This lack of understanding in U.S. culture is why we're still dealing with these problems and why many people don't acknowledge they exists ("well I'm not a racist...").
It doesn't matter how much I care, there's no amount of "involvement" I can engage in which will amount to a hill of beans.
If you take this attitude, then you are simply ceding your power to others. Major change for good is happening in the U.S., though it sometimes flies under the radar of the general public. I know this is true because I've led and experienced it myself. If you want to see something happen, you have to get involved.
We understand. It's just not where our skills lie. Which means our interests will go effectively unrepresented on every issue. Which in my mind calls into question the legitimacy of the whole process; why should I accept the legitimacy of a process where I automatically lose every time?
If you don't care enough to get involved, you don't have much to complain about. Many people are actively trying to improve things.
The very first step is to convince ordinary people that your position is in their self-interest and is important enough to spend time and money on. That in itself takes a rather large amount of skill, time and patience.
If you can pull that off, you're eligible for sainthood.
I, along with many others, have pulled it off. Many times.
Because it's not just hard; it requires a fucking miracle.
No, it doesn't. It requires dedication and persistence.
Arguments and legislation should be based on published literature and statistics, not on who is the better orator.
We would all like that to be true, but in the real world, statistics don't count for much when trying to pass legislation. Nor does oratory skill. They are useful to support a position but power does not react to statistics or oratory. Power reacts to power. Statistics and oratory can support power but they are not power in and of themselves.
The reason Williams can decline a debate is that ASCAP has a tremendous amount of power and Lessig has little, if any. ASCAP has nothing to lose by declining debate. Until Lessig (or someone else holding favorable views) can put an army of people in the room, including influential legislators, there's not much we're going to be able to do.
Unfortunately, geeks and nerds tend to not understand this fundamental political truth. It's not about what's objectively right. That has almost no worth in politics. It's about who you can influence.
There are other ways to build power than by raising boatloads of money, though money is necessary. The very first step is to convince ordinary people that your position is in their self-interest and is important enough to spend time and money on. That in itself takes a rather large amount of skill, time and patience.
Thank you! My number one issue with roundabouts is that people in the circle don't signal their exits. it is difficult for those entering to know when it is safe.
Those aren't roundabouts in DC. Those are traffic circles. The former don't have signals at the entrance points. In general, entrants to a traffic circle have right-of-way where on a roundabout it's the opposite.
I am a devoted Christian and I must comment on a couple of things from your post.
Every single prophecy in the book has come true so far.
Prophecy as understood by the inspired authors has little to do with predicting the future. It has everything to do with opening the eyes of the people to what's going on in the here and now. Isiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah, all of the major and minor prophets, were anointed by God to speak the truth of the day, which is unfortunately quite relevant to us today as well. The "predictions" are God's message about what kind of life the people were getting themselves into. We have our modern day prophets: Martin Luther King, Jr. is an oft-cited example and many of his prophetic speeches and writings about social justice beyond racial equity have been suppressed, not unlike what the ancient prophets experienced in their day. The truth is that we are all called to be prophets to one another. We need that to keep society going
Scientists have used it to find geological locations due to its historical accuracy.
The bible is not nor was it ever meant to be a history book in the sense we understand the term in our modern society. At the time the books were written, the historical focus was not writing down exactly what happened with attention to every fine detail. The intent was to convey how God is active in our lives and what kind of relationship we can have with God. That this or that specific thing actually happened is not important. What's important is the overall message of relationship, love and salvation.
Are there points of history in the bible that are validated with out modern scientific methods. Absolutely. Anyone who has studied ancient history understands that. Are there other points that are questionable with little hope of being "proven?" Yep. But for the Christian, it really makes no difference at all. The history isn't the point. The message is.
No. Branching works perfectly fine if you program the GPU as a vector machine. The reason branches within a warp (using NVIDIA terminology) are expensive is simply because a warp is really a vector.
I should add that with a vector programming model, the way to handle control flow is via masked operations, which GPUs provide. In fact divergence is simply the GPU hardware emulating a masked operation when the programmer/compiler hasn't supplied one.
The fact is a GPU is a very differently structured piece of hardware. If you want to use that to execute certain classes of algorithm orders of magnitude faster than on a scalar processor, then great, join in. If you want to unthinkingly write high level code and expect it to go super fast, move along, there's nothing for you here.
That's the wrong attitude. GPUs will fail as general-purpose machines if that's what the vendors are thinking. And thankfully, they aren't. The fact that one has to write all kinds of painful malloc/memcpy/free code, declare variables twice, hand-outline kernels, etc. is an abomination. This should be handled automatically by compilers, either via user directives or with advanced analysis.
Nvidia has chosen C as their lead language for nvcc because C is the most common HPC language by a country mile.
False. Fortran is by far the most common HPC language. But desktop users who have traditionally purchased GPUs don't usually know Fortran. And there's no reasonable Free Fortran implementation. That's why NVIDIA went with C. Companies like PGI are filling the Fortran gap.
The threads in a warp all run in lockstep. Different warps can follow separate control paths with no problem. That's because a warp is really a vector. Think of the GPU as a threaded vector machine and you're golden.
You're talking about solving two completely different problems. Gustafson's Law assumes weak scaling. Amdahl's law assumes strong scaling. It's easy to show that by scaling the problem size to the number of processors available, one can compute more in the same amount of time (weak scaling). It's much harder to keep the problem size the same and get linear speedup as the number of processors increases (strong scaling), ignoring superlinear effects like the problem suddenly fitting into the cache, which are not seen with real problems.
The stream architecture of modern GPU's work radically differently than a conventional CPU.
True if the comparison is to a commodity scalar CPU.
It is not as simple as scaling conventional multi-threading up to thousands of threads.
True. Many algorithms will not map well to the architecture. However, many others will map extremely well. Many scientific codes have been tuned over the decades to exploit high degrees of parallelism. Often the small data sets are the primary bottleneck. Strong scaling is hard, weak scaling is relatively easy.
Certain things that you are used to doing on a normal processor have an insane cost in GPU hardware.
In a sense. These are not scalar CPUs and traditional scalar optimization, while important, won't utilize the machine well. I can't think of any particular operation that's greatly slower then on a conventional CPU, provided one uses the programming model correctly (and some codes don't map well to that model).
For instance, the if statement.
No. Branching works perfectly fine if you program the GPU as a vector machine. The reason branches within a warp (using NVIDIA terminology) are expensive is simply because a warp is really a vector. The GPU vendors just don't want to tell you that because either they fear being tied to some perceived historical baggage with that term or they want to convince you they're doing something really new. GPUs are interesting, but they're really just threaded vector processors. Don't misunderstand me, though, it's a quite interesting architecture to work with!
I couldn't give half a rat's ass how much it costs or saves, personally. Cars = freedom. And freedom is more important than any other damn thing.
Define "freedom." I could just as easily state that our auto-oriented culture traps us into lives spent waiting on the freeway, keeps us in polluted transportation corridors and compels us to fight wars we otherwise would have no need to fight.
You need those roads paid for regardless, unless you think stores are stocked my magic fairies
Where exactly did I say we do not need roads? We need both roads and public transportation. We need choice. Isn't that required for freedom?
Slashdot Mirror
Also, explain how racism isn't prejudice
Racism (and sexism, etc.) is about power. It's about a group of privileged people using power to keep their privilege and the expense of another group. The emphasis matters. Racism essentially has nothing to do with individuals, individual thought or individual action. Bigotry is abhorrent, but in the end it doesn't oppress people. Public policy that consistently advantages one group over another does. We have structures of racism all over the place in the U.S. and it's been going on since before this country was founded. john powell at the Kirwin Institute has many insightful and helpful papers and presentations about structural racialization (his preferred term since "racism" has essentially been co-opted to the point of meaninglessness).
No, lawsuits affect the cost of health care very little (around 3% of the cost is due to lawsuits, as I recall). The overhead of private insurance is a major cost driver (all that paperwork to deny claims costs money!) as is a crapload of redundant technology (why do two clinics a block away both have MRI machines?). The private insurance industry has 10x the overhead costs of Medicare/Medicaid. The U.S. system is broken because we pay through the nose so private hospitals and clinics can "compete" with each other (i.e. buy the latest gadgets so they can market them) and so that insurance companies can pay for advertisements, lawyers and underwriters.
but most of those diseases are probably preventable by good nutrition and good lifestyle choices.
False. Personal behavior is only a small factor in health according to CDC research. The vast majority of your health is affected by things like the kind of environment you live in (do your have parks? Do you live near a freeway and pollution? and so on).
Dr. Anthony Iton and colleagues from Alameda County, CA cite research (longer presentation here) that indicates genes and access to health care account for about 30% of health outcomes. Wealth has a large impact on health outcomes. Essentially, poor health is more a problem of disparity and discrimination than anything else.
except that cutting taxes would been FAR better for the economy and employment.
How so? Trickle-down economics has been thoroughly debunked. Not once has cutting taxes spurred any economic activity. All that cutting taxes does is continue to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich, because guess who benefits most from tax cuts? It's a double whammy of the rich paying less into the commonwealth and cutting services to the very people who need them the most.
Well, she had relationships with people from doing work in her former position. It helps when you know most of people in the group you're transferring to. I think she may have taken some training courses at company expense, but I'm not sure. The most important thing is that she worked for a company and management that let her try.
Fifty years ago a single income household was the norm, and there were two cars in the garage, appliances in the house, and a far larger proportion of savings in the bank. The government paid down our WWII debt, and we basically financed the all of the Allies, among whom only Finland paid off its debt, in less than a decade.
And do you know how we did that? Do you know what the top income tax rate was in 1953, the first year of Ike's presidency? 92%
.
We've declined as a society primarily because we stopped investing in the common good. One can't go from a tax rate of 92% to a tax rate of 35% without seriously eroding the common good. It's the common good that drives prosperity because it is investment in these things that are the building blocks of a strong economy.
No, it's not the same at all. The people who accept scientific consensus on climate change are backed up by research. That's not the same as blind faith leading to monoculture and non-acceptance of contrary ideas. It's up to the deniers to prove the research is wrong and to this date, they haven't.
This is much too limiting. Changing careers can be a wonderful thing for people. I know someone who had no technical background and went from managing developers to being a developer and it was a great change for her. She found work to be more interesting, the problems challenging and finding solutions gave her a sense of accomplishment. In other words, a career change was much more fulfilling than simply sticking with what she knew.
And she did it around age 50.
have not ceded it, it has been taken. [...] If you believe that, then what you consider "good" I likely consider "evil".
Maybe, I don't know. If so, I'm perfectly content with you continuing to play the victim. If not, then it's time to get off the couch and do some work.
It's the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism.
No. This statement displays a complete lack of understanding of what racism and sexism are. They are not about differences. They are about power. They are about one group of privileged people wielding power over another in order to keep their privilege. They are not about individual thoughts, opinions or actions. They are about systemic and institutional bias. This lack of understanding in U.S. culture is why we're still dealing with these problems and why many people don't acknowledge they exists ("well I'm not a racist...").
It doesn't matter how much I care, there's no amount of "involvement" I can engage in which will amount to a hill of beans.
If you take this attitude, then you are simply ceding your power to others. Major change for good is happening in the U.S., though it sometimes flies under the radar of the general public. I know this is true because I've led and experienced it myself. If you want to see something happen, you have to get involved.
No, I was talking about Mead. Gandhi's quote is taken out of context. Mead's quote is just plain wrong.
We understand. It's just not where our skills lie. Which means our interests will go effectively unrepresented on every issue. Which in my mind calls into question the legitimacy of the whole process; why should I accept the legitimacy of a process where I automatically lose every time?
If you don't care enough to get involved, you don't have much to complain about. Many people are actively trying to improve things.
The very first step is to convince ordinary people that your position is in their self-interest and is important enough to spend time and money on. That in itself takes a rather large amount of skill, time and patience.
If you can pull that off, you're eligible for sainthood.
I, along with many others, have pulled it off. Many times.
Because it's not just hard; it requires a fucking miracle.
No, it doesn't. It requires dedication and persistence.
Right. Roundabouts were created to address some of the problems with traffic circles, also called rotaries.
This is only half-true, because the quote only talks about "they." It's missing what you have to do:
First they ignore you
Then you hold some public meetings
Then they laugh at you
Then you fill a room with 5,000 people
Then they fight you
Then you lobby legislators
Then you raise some money
Then you put 10,000 people in a room
Then you write a bill
Then you lobby legislators
Then you raise some money
Then you reintroduce the bill
Then you put 10,000 people in 500 rooms
Then you raise some money
Then you lobby legislators
Then you win
In other words, Margaret Mead was wrong.
Arguments and legislation should be based on published literature and statistics, not on who is the better orator.
We would all like that to be true, but in the real world, statistics don't count for much when trying to pass legislation. Nor does oratory skill. They are useful to support a position but power does not react to statistics or oratory. Power reacts to power. Statistics and oratory can support power but they are not power in and of themselves.
The reason Williams can decline a debate is that ASCAP has a tremendous amount of power and Lessig has little, if any. ASCAP has nothing to lose by declining debate. Until Lessig (or someone else holding favorable views) can put an army of people in the room, including influential legislators, there's not much we're going to be able to do.
Unfortunately, geeks and nerds tend to not understand this fundamental political truth. It's not about what's objectively right. That has almost no worth in politics. It's about who you can influence.
There are other ways to build power than by raising boatloads of money, though money is necessary. The very first step is to convince ordinary people that your position is in their self-interest and is important enough to spend time and money on. That in itself takes a rather large amount of skill, time and patience.
Thank you! My number one issue with roundabouts is that people in the circle don't signal their exits. it is difficult for those entering to know when it is safe.
Those aren't roundabouts in DC. Those are traffic circles. The former don't have signals at the entrance points. In general, entrants to a traffic circle have right-of-way where on a roundabout it's the opposite.
I am a devoted Christian and I must comment on a couple of things from your post.
Every single prophecy in the book has come true so far.
Prophecy as understood by the inspired authors has little to do with predicting the future. It has everything to do with opening the eyes of the people to what's going on in the here and now. Isiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah, all of the major and minor prophets, were anointed by God to speak the truth of the day, which is unfortunately quite relevant to us today as well. The "predictions" are God's message about what kind of life the people were getting themselves into. We have our modern day prophets: Martin Luther King, Jr. is an oft-cited example and many of his prophetic speeches and writings about social justice beyond racial equity have been suppressed, not unlike what the ancient prophets experienced in their day. The truth is that we are all called to be prophets to one another. We need that to keep society going
Scientists have used it to find geological locations due to its historical accuracy.
The bible is not nor was it ever meant to be a history book in the sense we understand the term in our modern society. At the time the books were written, the historical focus was not writing down exactly what happened with attention to every fine detail. The intent was to convey how God is active in our lives and what kind of relationship we can have with God. That this or that specific thing actually happened is not important. What's important is the overall message of relationship, love and salvation.
Are there points of history in the bible that are validated with out modern scientific methods. Absolutely. Anyone who has studied ancient history understands that. Are there other points that are questionable with little hope of being "proven?" Yep. But for the Christian, it really makes no difference at all. The history isn't the point. The message is.
No. Branching works perfectly fine if you program the GPU as a vector machine. The reason branches within a warp (using NVIDIA terminology) are expensive is simply because a warp is really a vector.
I should add that with a vector programming model, the way to handle control flow is via masked operations, which GPUs provide. In fact divergence is simply the GPU hardware emulating a masked operation when the programmer/compiler hasn't supplied one.
The fact is a GPU is a very differently structured piece of hardware. If you want to use that to execute certain classes of algorithm orders of magnitude faster than on a scalar processor, then great, join in. If you want to unthinkingly write high level code and expect it to go super fast, move along, there's nothing for you here.
That's the wrong attitude. GPUs will fail as general-purpose machines if that's what the vendors are thinking. And thankfully, they aren't. The fact that one has to write all kinds of painful malloc/memcpy/free code, declare variables twice, hand-outline kernels, etc. is an abomination. This should be handled automatically by compilers, either via user directives or with advanced analysis.
Nvidia has chosen C as their lead language for nvcc because C is the most common HPC language by a country mile.
False. Fortran is by far the most common HPC language. But desktop users who have traditionally purchased GPUs don't usually know Fortran. And there's no reasonable Free Fortran implementation. That's why NVIDIA went with C. Companies like PGI are filling the Fortran gap.
The threads all run in lockstep
The threads in a warp all run in lockstep. Different warps can follow separate control paths with no problem. That's because a warp is really a vector. Think of the GPU as a threaded vector machine and you're golden.
You're talking about solving two completely different problems. Gustafson's Law assumes weak scaling. Amdahl's law assumes strong scaling. It's easy to show that by scaling the problem size to the number of processors available, one can compute more in the same amount of time (weak scaling). It's much harder to keep the problem size the same and get linear speedup as the number of processors increases (strong scaling), ignoring superlinear effects like the problem suddenly fitting into the cache, which are not seen with real problems.
The stream architecture of modern GPU's work radically differently than a conventional CPU.
True if the comparison is to a commodity scalar CPU.
It is not as simple as scaling conventional multi-threading up to thousands of threads.
True. Many algorithms will not map well to the architecture. However, many others will map extremely well. Many scientific codes have been tuned over the decades to exploit high degrees of parallelism. Often the small data sets are the primary bottleneck. Strong scaling is hard, weak scaling is relatively easy.
Certain things that you are used to doing on a normal processor have an insane cost in GPU hardware.
In a sense. These are not scalar CPUs and traditional scalar optimization, while important, won't utilize the machine well. I can't think of any particular operation that's greatly slower then on a conventional CPU, provided one uses the programming model correctly (and some codes don't map well to that model).
For instance, the if statement.
No. Branching works perfectly fine if you program the GPU as a vector machine. The reason branches within a warp (using NVIDIA terminology) are expensive is simply because a warp is really a vector. The GPU vendors just don't want to tell you that because either they fear being tied to some perceived historical baggage with that term or they want to convince you they're doing something really new. GPUs are interesting, but they're really just threaded vector processors. Don't misunderstand me, though, it's a quite interesting architecture to work with!
I couldn't give half a rat's ass how much it costs or saves, personally. Cars = freedom. And freedom is more important than any other damn thing.
Define "freedom." I could just as easily state that our auto-oriented culture traps us into lives spent waiting on the freeway, keeps us in polluted transportation corridors and compels us to fight wars we otherwise would have no need to fight.
You need those roads paid for regardless, unless you think stores are stocked my magic fairies
Where exactly did I say we do not need roads? We need both roads and public transportation. We need choice. Isn't that required for freedom?