I take away from this comment that you don't shop around, right? You either randomly buy without considering cost, or in fact search for the highest-cost vendor for a particular product, right? You use pricewatch, but you sort by price in descending order, right?
I'm guessing you don't. Well, then in fact, you should be fucking yourself because competition is driving low-skill jobs overseas. Without outsourcing to cheaper regions, a company cannot compete for the business of those who attempt to find the lowest price.
FWIW, I am a software architect, and was a software engineer for many years. I know that the kinds of things I do for my company cannot be done by a random coder straight out of CIT (Calcutta Institute of Technology, remember?:) ). This is how I, and other insightful US engineers, remain competitive: by augmenting my skill set and making use of my intelligence to build indispensable infrastructure that provides a much greater value to my company than 8 random coders from India or China could.
I'm sure the leftist/statist/communist anti-globalization pro-third-world-status-quo Slashdot moderators will bury this comment, but I hope at least some of you read it. Stop whining; understand the problem; figure out what you can do about it; and do it!
: "PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR : IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF!"
: Clear enough?
I can't agree more. Unfortunately, the state government insists on distributing the cost to those who don't use these resources.
If it makes you feel any better, I guarantee you I'm paying more than my fair share for the public resources I use, tax rates being what they are and all.
As a final note, never underestimate a libertarian's desire to stop benefitting unfairly from the productivity of others.
If you want to pay for the cost of bringing broadband to the cows, go right ahead. I don't want to pay for it: I already pay enough for my house (mortgage, taxes, etc.) and ability to live in a high-demand area, that I don't see any reason why I should help further subsidize your decision to live in cheapville.
To sum:
PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF!
: And those shifts can be influenced in the long : term by favorable zoning laws and tax breaks.
Emphasis mine.
Long term is much longer than a few years or a decade. Long term is several decades. AND the shifts you are talking about are a much less blunt instrument than the hammer of gerrymandering. All in all, a much better situation.
But thanks for proving my point that there's nothing we can do to avoid playing the game: we can just make the rules much harder and the outcomes less certain.
: Which unfortunately ignores shifting population : demographics.
Um, changing districts to follow certain population demographics is precisely the activity we're trying to avoid, Dr. Brilliant.
Implicit in your statement is that there's some "correct" way of forming the districts based on demographics. I can assure you that there is no single correct way to do this, and any system you or anyone else comes up with will be arbitrary (and likely capricious), and will benefit some demographic over another.
The only way to deal fairly with this is to make sure the rules of the game don't change, so people don't have to constantly move around to neighboring districts to make sure their vote matters: the evils of the districting as performed by an algorithm are well-known and can be predicted decades in advance. I assert that this is as close to "fair" as one can get.
: Although in the article, they mainly focus on : Texas, it's pretty clear that the whole system is : being gamed and gamed hardest by the Republicans.
False.
Gerrymandering is actually played hardest by professional racialists who do their best to construct minority districts in heterogeneous areas. This is historical fact: gerrymandering first existed for precisely this reason.
More than highlighting a problem with a particular political party, though, this system indicates a problem with geographic representation in general. But, before you go there, proportional representation has its own set of issues, and shouldn't be considered a panacea.:)
Are they "independent" like the NRA is to the RNC, or like the ACLU is to the DNC?
The problem is that these commissions are made up of people who are inevitably partisan, so what you end up with is only the illusion of independence, when in fact the party with the most adherents on the commission effectively draws the district boundaries to the benefit of its members, while making it look all nice and non-partisan. Not good: I'd rather have the honest appearance of partisanship and public pressure resulting from bad press than a hidden agenda and no accountability masquerading as an "independent commission."
In reality, there is no way to draw district boundaries in a "fair" way, because "fair" means different things to different people. The closest thing you can do is to permanently fix some method (algorithm) for drawing boundaries, which takes humans out of the loop forevermore; from that point forward, the rules of the game are at least known, so they don't change drastically every time a new party gets a 51% majority.
Also, if you are wondering why prices aren't dropping with the (ab)use of cheap overseas labor then one thing you need to look at are the compensation packages our nation's business executives have been giving themselves (i.e. Tyco, GE).
False. These compensation packages are almost never big enough to make a serious dent in profitability. We're talking millions or tens of millions versus billions or tens of billions.
I must have been asleep when the supposedly rational bred with the irrational to produce geeks who hate Bush enough to oppose everything he does, despite the fact that they'd objectively like some of these things if they were implemented by a socialist.
Seriously, ask yourselves: how many of you posting in opposition to this are really in favor of smaller government, or streamlining NASA (who says he won't take this opportunity to de-suck NASA?), or really care about the size of the budget deficit or about how high the tax rate is on the highest income bracket?
It's not BANANAism either ("build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone"), which explains the actions of the anti-everything crowd, the neo-Luddites: we are geeks. We obviously are not against progress, unless up is now down and Britney has become a nun.
Now, I personally oppose the government performing research of this sort, as the private sector can do it better; but unless my mods over time are unrepresentative, the libertarians on slashdot are vastly outnumbered by the statists/socialists/communists/pinkos who are surely not opposed to massive government programs. Therefore, I posit that you should love George W. Bush, who has increased government spending faster than any president since Lyndon B. "budget-buster" Johnson. Yikes!
Be an independent. Use your brain to analyze policies, instead of opposing everything this president does simply because it's the fashionable thing to do. Learn about the history of government, question your beliefs, and see how fixed your opinions really are.
Why don't you drive? It's a 2-1/2 hour trip at most: I-90 west of I-84/Sturbridge is basically empty all the time, and as long as you're not trying to get into either end around 8 am, you shouldn't hit a lot of traffic.
I take commuter rail to work. Here's the breakdown of my one-way commute to work:
8:00 leave house 8:18 arrive at commuter rail station, only 3 miles away (variance is high, so I have to leave early) 8:24 train leaves station 8:45 train arrives at terminal 9:00 finish walk to subway 9:03 subway comes 9:05 leave subway 9:08 finish walk to office
As you can see, only 23 minutes of the 68 minute commute is actually spent *on* the train. If I drove into work and planned my arrival for 9:08, I'd only have to leave at 8:30, which would give me an extra half hour. Leaving work by car gives an even greater advantage, since it only takes 25 minutes to get from my office to my house when I leave at 6:30.
The only reason I take commuter rail is that the price of parking is kept artificially high by virtue of the city of Cambridge's quotas on parking spaces: I'd need to pay $235/mo for parking in addition to wear-and-tear on the car and gas, versus the $94/mo I pay for the commuter rail pass (plus the $50/mo or so I already pay in taxes to support the transit system).
IMO, the convenience of having my car at work would balance out an extra $100; as it stands, I don't think it balances out an extra $200+, so I suck it up and use the commuter rail.
but it goes against US law as well. This is a decidedly monopolistic move
While I'm in agreement that Europe should just tell the US government to fuck off in this instance, this statement is just stupid. A government is by definition a monopoly: it has to be a monopoly over some domain---typically territory---or it has no authority.
Unless you're prepared to declare all governments illegal---which of course makes no sense, since only in the presence of laws enforced by government can something be considered illegal---then antitrust measures cannot be interpreted as applying to governments.
I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering how far off we are from Pham's locators from Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. Having a mobile sensor network floating in the air that you can use for surveillance may seem Orwellian at first blush, but that isn't the case if we all have access to such technology.
Heinlein discusses the very problem of ridding a closed system of heat in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. I don't think it's a problem most laymen have considered, yet it's one of the biggest problems with designing spacefaring craft.
Orrin Hatch is the type of a**hole who gives all Republicans a bad name.
But there's also a lack of parallelism here: Republicans constantly get shit for the actions of these buffoons, but is the senior blimp from Massachusetts, the infamous Teddy Kennedy, ever called on the evil things he stands for?
The US is still a huge market for manufactured goods, including cars. Even if Detroit is depressed, the rest of the country is doing rather well. I suspect that the big three automakers would be the big zero instead of the big two if they didn't attempt to reduce their costs to compete with the Japanese: the fact that they haven't reduced their costs enough by kicking out the unions and their expensive, lazy workforce means that year over year they lose even more business to the Japanese on quality and price and to the Germans on quality and luxury.
What you are begging for is more protectionism: the only way to get what you want the way you want it is to tax imports to allow American companies to compete. Guess what: the vast majority of Americans who aren't affected by the outflow of jobs to cheaper labor markets don't want to pay more for lower quality.
I, for instance, will not buy an American car unless and until they do something to reduce their total costs, which probably means destroying the major labor unions, reducing pay for line workers, and exporting a large number of jobs. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels the same way.
What I'm doing to protect my job from being exported is not sticking my head in the sand: rather, I'm increasing my skill set and indispensability to the point that I'll be in the last 10% of people to be laid off because I have lots of specialized knowledge that a cog in India or China wouldn't have. It sucks if you (generic) need to go into an entirely different field to achieve this, but I have very little sympathy: I don't want to subsidize your inflated wages.
What is to stop the voting machine from modifying the ballot choices right as the voter casts them? Your system provides no integrity guarantees at all: we need a system in which the voter actually looks at a piece of paper with his choices and validates by eyeball that the votes are correct, and in which this very same piece of paper that the voter validated is used in random manual recounts. Nothing else provides any confidence in integrity.
Saying "The bus is the transportation of choice for poor people" doesn't mean it isn't also the transportation of choice for others: exclusivity isn't a logical consequence of that statement.
I was an undergraduate student of Brian Greene's (honors freshman mechanics) at Cornell. I was very impressed by the Nova special, as having read The Elegant Universe several years ago, I found the special explained many elements of M-theory more clearly. In person, he was quite affable, and even seemed to take my freshman idol worship in stride. I'm happy to see he's gotten the kind of popular (ok, *more* popular than usual) admiration he deserves.
What do all you people have against X? X rocks: it has network transparency, widget-independence, and has proven incredibly efficient and flexible. I will never give up X, until something with a strict superset of features appears. You can go with a crippled OS X or Windows-like GUI, but I will stay with X.
> What the heck is the point of a phone that can't > send text messages?
Perhaps people like me could use it. I've never sent a text message from my phone, and I suspect it'll be years before I start doing that. Don't assume everyone has the same needs you do.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct. Rereading your message, it seems the last line is incongruous with the rest. You indeed do seem to give the same advice I did.
: Fuck corporations.
:) ). This is how I, and other insightful US engineers, remain competitive: by augmenting my skill set and making use of my intelligence to build indispensable infrastructure that provides a much greater value to my company than 8 random coders from India or China could.
I take away from this comment that you don't shop around, right? You either randomly buy without considering cost, or in fact search for the highest-cost vendor for a particular product, right? You use pricewatch, but you sort by price in descending order, right?
I'm guessing you don't. Well, then in fact, you should be fucking yourself because competition is driving low-skill jobs overseas. Without outsourcing to cheaper regions, a company cannot compete for the business of those who attempt to find the lowest price.
FWIW, I am a software architect, and was a software engineer for many years. I know that the kinds of things I do for my company cannot be done by a random coder straight out of CIT (Calcutta Institute of Technology, remember?
I'm sure the leftist/statist/communist anti-globalization pro-third-world-status-quo Slashdot moderators will bury this comment, but I hope at least some of you read it. Stop whining; understand the problem; figure out what you can do about it; and do it!
: "PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR
: IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF!"
: Clear enough?
I can't agree more. Unfortunately, the state government insists on distributing the cost to those who don't use these resources.
If it makes you feel any better, I guarantee you I'm paying more than my fair share for the public resources I use, tax rates being what they are and all.
As a final note, never underestimate a libertarian's desire to stop benefitting unfairly from the productivity of others.
My house (4BR, 2BA, 1900 sq. feet) would cost $50,000 in the sticks. I paid $275,000 for it. In comparison, my area is high-demand.
If you want to pay for the cost of bringing broadband to the cows, go right ahead. I don't want to pay for it: I already pay enough for my house (mortgage, taxes, etc.) and ability to live in a high-demand area, that I don't see any reason why I should help further subsidize your decision to live in cheapville.
To sum:
PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF! PAY FOR IT YOURSELF!
Clear enough?
: And those shifts can be influenced in the long
: term by favorable zoning laws and tax breaks.
Emphasis mine.
Long term is much longer than a few years or a decade. Long term is several decades. AND the shifts you are talking about are a much less blunt instrument than the hammer of gerrymandering. All in all, a much better situation.
But thanks for proving my point that there's nothing we can do to avoid playing the game: we can just make the rules much harder and the outcomes less certain.
: Which unfortunately ignores shifting population
: demographics.
Um, changing districts to follow certain population demographics is precisely the activity we're trying to avoid, Dr. Brilliant.
Implicit in your statement is that there's some "correct" way of forming the districts based on demographics. I can assure you that there is no single correct way to do this, and any system you or anyone else comes up with will be arbitrary (and likely capricious), and will benefit some demographic over another.
The only way to deal fairly with this is to make sure the rules of the game don't change, so people don't have to constantly move around to neighboring districts to make sure their vote matters: the evils of the districting as performed by an algorithm are well-known and can be predicted decades in advance. I assert that this is as close to "fair" as one can get.
: Although in the article, they mainly focus on
:)
: Texas, it's pretty clear that the whole system is
: being gamed and gamed hardest by the Republicans.
False.
Gerrymandering is actually played hardest by professional racialists who do their best to construct minority districts in heterogeneous areas. This is historical fact: gerrymandering first existed for precisely this reason.
More than highlighting a problem with a particular political party, though, this system indicates a problem with geographic representation in general. But, before you go there, proportional representation has its own set of issues, and shouldn't be considered a panacea.
What does "independent" mean, really?
Are they "independent" like the NRA is to the RNC, or like the ACLU is to the DNC?
The problem is that these commissions are made up of people who are inevitably partisan, so what you end up with is only the illusion of independence, when in fact the party with the most adherents on the commission effectively draws the district boundaries to the benefit of its members, while making it look all nice and non-partisan. Not good: I'd rather have the honest appearance of partisanship and public pressure resulting from bad press than a hidden agenda and no accountability masquerading as an "independent commission."
In reality, there is no way to draw district boundaries in a "fair" way, because "fair" means different things to different people. The closest thing you can do is to permanently fix some method (algorithm) for drawing boundaries, which takes humans out of the loop forevermore; from that point forward, the rules of the game are at least known, so they don't change drastically every time a new party gets a 51% majority.
Also, if you are wondering why prices aren't dropping with the (ab)use of cheap overseas labor then one thing you need to look at are the compensation packages our nation's business executives have been giving themselves (i.e. Tyco, GE).
False. These compensation packages are almost never big enough to make a serious dent in profitability. We're talking millions or tens of millions versus billions or tens of billions.
Therefore, there must another explanation.
I must have been asleep when the supposedly rational bred with the irrational to produce geeks who hate Bush enough to oppose everything he does, despite the fact that they'd objectively like some of these things if they were implemented by a socialist.
Seriously, ask yourselves: how many of you posting in opposition to this are really in favor of smaller government, or streamlining NASA (who says he won't take this opportunity to de-suck NASA?), or really care about the size of the budget deficit or about how high the tax rate is on the highest income bracket?
It's not BANANAism either ("build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone"), which explains the actions of the anti-everything crowd, the neo-Luddites: we are geeks. We obviously are not against progress, unless up is now down and Britney has become a nun.
Now, I personally oppose the government performing research of this sort, as the private sector can do it better; but unless my mods over time are unrepresentative, the libertarians on slashdot are vastly outnumbered by the statists/socialists/communists/pinkos who are surely not opposed to massive government programs. Therefore, I posit that you should love George W. Bush, who has increased government spending faster than any president since Lyndon B. "budget-buster" Johnson. Yikes!
Be an independent. Use your brain to analyze policies, instead of opposing everything this president does simply because it's the fashionable thing to do. Learn about the history of government, question your beliefs, and see how fixed your opinions really are.
Why don't you drive? It's a 2-1/2 hour trip at most: I-90 west of I-84/Sturbridge is basically empty all the time, and as long as you're not trying to get into either end around 8 am, you shouldn't hit a lot of traffic.
Definitely deserving of insightful.
I take commuter rail to work. Here's the breakdown of my one-way commute to work:
8:00 leave house
8:18 arrive at commuter rail station, only 3 miles away (variance is high, so I have to leave early)
8:24 train leaves station
8:45 train arrives at terminal
9:00 finish walk to subway
9:03 subway comes
9:05 leave subway
9:08 finish walk to office
As you can see, only 23 minutes of the 68 minute commute is actually spent *on* the train. If I drove into work and planned my arrival for 9:08, I'd only have to leave at 8:30, which would give me an extra half hour. Leaving work by car gives an even greater advantage, since it only takes 25 minutes to get from my office to my house when I leave at 6:30.
The only reason I take commuter rail is that the price of parking is kept artificially high by virtue of the city of Cambridge's quotas on parking spaces: I'd need to pay $235/mo for parking in addition to wear-and-tear on the car and gas, versus the $94/mo I pay for the commuter rail pass (plus the $50/mo or so I already pay in taxes to support the transit system).
IMO, the convenience of having my car at work would balance out an extra $100; as it stands, I don't think it balances out an extra $200+, so I suck it up and use the commuter rail.
but it goes against US law as well. This is a decidedly monopolistic move
While I'm in agreement that Europe should just tell the US government to fuck off in this instance, this statement is just stupid. A government is by definition a monopoly: it has to be a monopoly over some domain---typically territory---or it has no authority.
Unless you're prepared to declare all governments illegal---which of course makes no sense, since only in the presence of laws enforced by government can something be considered illegal---then antitrust measures cannot be interpreted as applying to governments.
Mod parent down.
I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering how far off we are from Pham's locators from Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. Having a mobile sensor network floating in the air that you can use for surveillance may seem Orwellian at first blush, but that isn't the case if we all have access to such technology.
Heinlein discusses the very problem of ridding a closed system of heat in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. I don't think it's a problem most laymen have considered, yet it's one of the biggest problems with designing spacefaring craft.
Orrin Hatch is the type of a**hole who gives all Republicans a bad name.
But there's also a lack of parallelism here: Republicans constantly get shit for the actions of these buffoons, but is the senior blimp from Massachusetts, the infamous Teddy Kennedy, ever called on the evil things he stands for?
The US is still a huge market for manufactured goods, including cars. Even if Detroit is depressed, the rest of the country is doing rather well. I suspect that the big three automakers would be the big zero instead of the big two if they didn't attempt to reduce their costs to compete with the Japanese: the fact that they haven't reduced their costs enough by kicking out the unions and their expensive, lazy workforce means that year over year they lose even more business to the Japanese on quality and price and to the Germans on quality and luxury.
What you are begging for is more protectionism: the only way to get what you want the way you want it is to tax imports to allow American companies to compete. Guess what: the vast majority of Americans who aren't affected by the outflow of jobs to cheaper labor markets don't want to pay more for lower quality.
I, for instance, will not buy an American car unless and until they do something to reduce their total costs, which probably means destroying the major labor unions, reducing pay for line workers, and exporting a large number of jobs. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels the same way.
What I'm doing to protect my job from being exported is not sticking my head in the sand: rather, I'm increasing my skill set and indispensability to the point that I'll be in the last 10% of people to be laid off because I have lots of specialized knowledge that a cog in India or China wouldn't have. It sucks if you (generic) need to go into an entirely different field to achieve this, but I have very little sympathy: I don't want to subsidize your inflated wages.
What is to stop the voting machine from modifying the ballot choices right as the voter casts them? Your system provides no integrity guarantees at all: we need a system in which the voter actually looks at a piece of paper with his choices and validates by eyeball that the votes are correct, and in which this very same piece of paper that the voter validated is used in random manual recounts. Nothing else provides any confidence in integrity.
I've posted it once and I'll keep posting it until people actually listen.
The right way to make email "cost" something to mass mailers but not cost end-users anything is HashCash.
See http://www.cypherspace.org/~adam/hashcash/ for more info.
Saying "The bus is the transportation of choice for poor people" doesn't mean it isn't also the transportation of choice for others: exclusivity isn't a logical consequence of that statement.
I was an undergraduate student of Brian Greene's (honors freshman mechanics) at Cornell. I was very impressed by the Nova special, as having read The Elegant Universe several years ago, I found the special explained many elements of M-theory more clearly. In person, he was quite affable, and even seemed to take my freshman idol worship in stride. I'm happy to see he's gotten the kind of popular (ok, *more* popular than usual) admiration he deserves.
What do all you people have against X? X rocks: it has network transparency, widget-independence, and has proven incredibly efficient and flexible. I will never give up X, until something with a strict superset of features appears. You can go with a crippled OS X or Windows-like GUI, but I will stay with X.
> What the heck is the point of a phone that can't
> send text messages?
Perhaps people like me could use it. I've never sent a text message from my phone, and I suspect it'll be years before I start doing that. Don't assume everyone has the same needs you do.
> Great I hope the smart states slap a hefty sales
> tax on these things to cover the cost of disposal
> say 100 dollars per unit
Do you honestly think the disposal cost of a disposable phone is actually $100? Give me a break. F'n environmentalist whackos...