What gets me about this story isn't that they sold their children... you're going to have one or two parents out there in any society that are so screwed up in their heads that they'd contemplate such an option to fund whatever addiction they may have. The significance is that it's so easy to do so in China.
No, they would freak out because where do you think the survivors in that massive neighboring country are going to go? Also, what nation would want their immediate neighbor to be covered in nuclear fallout that may just blow your way...
Lot of people are dismissing this, but I think there is sound logic to what they're saying for two reasons. One, by becoming a purely focused battery manufacturer, Musk becomes platform agnostic and will have a much better chance of licensing his tech and selling his batteries to all auto manufacturers. This could benefit the broader electric vehicle industry as the technology is now available to dozens of well established manufacturers who can produce vehicles on multiple orders of magnitude greater than Tesla could possibly reach in a decade or more. If they do it right, they could make a huge amount of money this route, dominating a key control point in the electric vehicle.
The second thing is that they will continue to be highly constrained in their manufacturing capabilities for a while. I love Tesla and would love to own one of their vehicles, but the company's production system will take at least a decade or two to even get anywhere close to the order of magnitude that more mainstream auto manufacturers are able to make. This may not matter much if you want your Tesla to be unique, but if your goal is to see the mass deployment of electric vehicles in the near future, organically scaling up Tesla may not necessarily be the way to go.
All that being said, I HIGHLY doubt Musk will go in this direction. His MO at other companies has always been platform oriented with tight vertical integration, and I don't see that changing anytime in the near future, not with him at the helm.
I think you make a good point. I do believe there is a welder shortage, but it's for niche or highly experienced areas. Companies allowed the pipeline to dry up, and now they are paying the price and scrambling to make up for years of neglect. Don't think you can make a H1B crisis as easily with welding however: people may be confused or intimidated by what advanced scientific and programming fields do, but welding is one that tends to fall more neatly into traditional territory of organized labor. They may be weakened, but they can fight tooth and nail on that one.
That's a silly statement. They're government bureaucrats. At least in the United States, you never join the bureaucracy if your goal is to make money. Even contracting for the government, while better paying than direct government employment, still pales compared to more lucrative areas of the economy, especially for the skill sets we're talking about.
I'm REALLY curious as to what they expect to replace the coal mining business with in the middle of rural West Virginia. Even assuming you could retrain all those workers, that simply leaves an entire army of now skilled workers sitting in towns that have had their economy completely decimated by the elimination of coal. One doesn't simply regenerate a brand new, magic economy there from scratch. Even something as basic as building a new factory, say a solar panel factory, would require not just the cost of building the factory, but the infrastructure to support said factory (roads, water, power, rail links, etc.), and $50B is not going to cover the cost of doing that for 87,000 workers.
Yes, just in case you haven't been following all the coverage from the last three or four days, the United States has been providing a large amount of satellite data, even leveraging their missile launch detection system to search for possible explosions. The more interesting question is why it took the Chinese this long to provide satellite imagery to search for a plane full of primarily their own citizenry in its own region.
This program is probably focused on members of the bureaucracy, but I wonder if they're going to cover another very significant group of government officials with security clearances: Members of Congress and their staffs. A lot of your leaks happen over on Capitol Hill after all. Then again, I'm going to take a guess that they will very vocally and aggressively oppose this action and play the separation of powers card to shield themselves from this new effort.
The Financial Times [Paywall] is reporting that a highly sophisticated cyberweapon known as Ouroboros is being used to infect, monitor and potentially attack Ukrainian computer networks including government systems. Forensics mark it as being Russian developed, and the article compares it to Stuxnet in terms of sophistication and capability (though it is not related to that specific software). Websites are small potatoes, nothing more than spray paint on a wall. This appears to be more more like explosives, designed to take out targeted infrastructure.
I think an important distinction needs to be made about the difference between Google Glasses versus cellphones, cameras and other more traditional recording devices. With the latter, it's relatively obvious if someone is recording you: the item's lenses are pointed at you. If the cellphone is in their pocket or angled at my feet, it's easy to see it's not pointed at me. It's also easy for me to verify if they are recording me on a cellphone or not, just simply flip the thing around and take a look. With Google Glasses, I have no idea if a person looking at me is simply looking or is actually recording. There's no indication, and it's not quick to spot check; they have to go through the process of actually removing the glasses and showing me. It creates uncertainty on whether or not I'm being recorded, and therefore, creates unease.
That being said, this event seems to be just as much about the whole Techie vs. "Traditional" San Francisco debate which is a whole different can of worms.
Companies have scaled back on on-the-job training because the moment they invest heavily in an employee, said employee will jump ship to another firm. A lot of times too, it's not even for more money, it's for a more prestigious company, hotter product, etc. Why bother trying to train in house talent when they're going to jump ship? Better to just look for someone who is qualified to do the job from the get go.
First, I'm going to say I'm all for reductions in military spending. No objections drawing down the military machine and redeploying those funds to more productive uses for the economy.
However, I do want to address what I view as the misinterpretation that the United States is somehow starving infrastructure and education spending. Contrary to popular belief, the US dumps huge amounts of resources into both. The US spends 3.3% of its GDP on infrastructure, on par with nations like Canada and Germany. In education, the US spend $1,000B a year in education spending, ~$200B more a year on education than on all combined defense, veteran and civil defense spending. I don't think the question for the United States is whether or not the government spends sufficient resources, but it's more a question of how those resources are allocated and spent. It's a question of geographic and socioeconomic distribution as well as effectiveness of spending.
It's good to see some real competition, but it's disappointing that most of the locations chosen are simply further upgrading areas that already have a large tech presence. In some ways, it almost feels like it's further growing the gap between technologically advanced cities and the rest of the country.
This is true, but I would add that there is a real calculus that the Chinese are doing, and if North Korea's new leadership pushes too hard, the Chinese government may find that they'd be better off "forcefully advocating" for new North Korean leadership. The nuclear weapons and recent violent altercations are already making the Chinese uneasy, especially since they give China's neighbors more excuses to pour money into military upgrades... upgrades that can also be used to contest Chinese military supremacy in the region. The Kim Jong Un's recent purges of pro-Chinese factions in the government isn't exactly currying favor either.
No, it's China's view that the DPRK's internal affairs are none of its business until China feels that the DPRK is no longer worth propping up. China is out for China's interest, and they are more than happy to interfere when it's in their national interest, no different than any other major global power. They may not currently have the force projection capabilities that other nations had, but just the sheer number of weapons they've shipped during the PRC's short history to pro-Chinese insurgencies and governments shows that they are not above this game. Perhaps the most blatant was the punitive campaign they launched against Vietnam in 1979, leaving tens of thousands of people dead and "scorched earth" in the northern half of Vietnam, all because the Vietnamese had the audacity to stop the massacres of the pro-PRC Khmer Rouge.
Yet for now, as much of a headache that the DPRK is for China, they put up with them because all of the other options are much less desirable for China (anarchy from regime collapse, war on its frontier, millions of refugees).
When one bothers to actually look at the data, the rank for the United States is still higher than its ranking in 2006, 2007 and 2011. Since 2002, the United States press freedom has bounced back and forth between the 20s and 50s. This is not to say that there isn't merit to the deficits in press freedom that Reporters Without Borders points out; there are very legitimate concerns being raised about recent efforts by the current administration to crack down on leakers and whistleblowers. Yet because Reporters Without Borders is regularly changing their methodology, you can't really use the data to make a true comparison of any nation's change in rank beyond very broad generalizations. Here's a good story in the Washington Post that makes this point.
What makes this particular case even crazier is that they didn't bother to humor him with the sort of token, small dollar amount that most, more established companies will offer when this sort of thing arises (and in this case, the photographer might have actually accepted). Nope, they went straight for the lawsuit.
Given everyone raving about evil corporate profits, I wonder if half the commentators even know what a cooperative is. If one simply reads the article, they can see that the members of this co-op are negotiating to try and come up with a better solution.
You realize of course what you are proposing is effectively a declaration of war against nearly every major power, essentially stating that diplomatic relations should be severed with the United States, China, Russia and even other EU member states.
Variation of Das Kapital Overproduction Paradox
on
If I Had a Hammer
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· Score: 1
I would point out that this argument feels a lot like a variation on Karl Marx's overproduction paradox in capitalist societies. Marx's focus on cause was a little different, he viewed that there would be too many goods ultimately driving down profits and triggering needs for efficiency, but the cycle essentially becomes the same - competition forces increased efficiency to produce products, but increased efficiency reduces labor required and thus fewer employed people who can afford said products. Then, companies are forced to become even more efficient to improve margins, but that just leads to further unemployment and greater numbers of people who can't afford said products. Those issues were partially offset historical circumstance (global warfare) and by the creation of new industries that can partially absorb some of the unemployed (tech boom), but ultimately, the trend seems to still be on the same trajectory.
All the dust kicked up by talk on the President and Congress probably misses one of the key pieces of Gates' excerpt, his critique of the United States being "too quick to reach for a gun" in times of crisis.
Wars are a lot easier to get into than out of. Those who ask about exit strategies or question what will happen if assumptions prove wrong are rarely welcome at the conference table when the fire-breathers are demanding that we strike—as they did when advocating invading Iraq, intervening in Libya and Syria, or bombing Iran's nuclear sites. But in recent decades, presidents confronted with tough problems abroad have too often been too quick to reach for a gun. Our foreign and national security policy has become too militarized, the use of force too easy for presidents.
Today, too many ideologues call for U.S. force as the first option rather than a last resort. On the left, we hear about the "responsibility to protect" civilians to justify military intervention in Libya, Syria, Sudan and elsewhere. On the right, the failure to strike Syria or Iran is deemed an abdication of U.S. leadership. And so the rest of the world sees the U.S. as a militaristic country quick to launch planes, cruise missiles and drones deep into sovereign countries or ungoverned spaces. There are limits to what even the strongest and greatest nation on Earth can do—and not every outrage, act of aggression, oppression or crisis should elicit a U.S. military response.
This is particularly worth remembering as technology changes the face of war. A button is pushed in Nevada, and seconds later a pickup truck explodes in Mosul. A bomb destroys the targeted house on the right and leaves the one on the left intact. For too many people—including defense "experts," members of Congress, executive branch officials and ordinary citizens—war has become a kind of videogame or action movie: bloodless, painless and odorless. But my years at the Pentagon left me even more skeptical of systems analysis, computer models, game theories or doctrines that suggest that war is anything other than tragic, inefficient and uncertain.
Should be noted that even back during the Napoleonic era, organized armies struggled with rules and regulations how to deal with irregular forces. The term guerrilla after all came from that era. They struggled with how to treat such individuals and were forced into the same messy counterinsurgency campaigns that you see today (perhaps even uglier since there were less restraints on just outright torching villages and massacring civilians). This wasn't just limited to the French or that time either: you saw this with just about every major civilization throughout the world and most of history as a continuous problem up until today. Any laws or conventions were always thrown out when dealing with unconventional forces, with organized armies feeling "freed" of constraints when dealing with them.
No, but the Brits and the French directly created the monster that came back and bit them in WWII. They decided that at the end of WWI, it was better to screw over the Germans as much as possible, laying the groundwork for the birth of the Nazis. Kind of like how the West is stuck dealing with terrorism now: they screwed with the Middle East for so long that eventually it gave birth to craziness that is now coming after them.
Slashdot Mirror
What gets me about this story isn't that they sold their children... you're going to have one or two parents out there in any society that are so screwed up in their heads that they'd contemplate such an option to fund whatever addiction they may have. The significance is that it's so easy to do so in China.
No, they would freak out because where do you think the survivors in that massive neighboring country are going to go? Also, what nation would want their immediate neighbor to be covered in nuclear fallout that may just blow your way...
Lot of people are dismissing this, but I think there is sound logic to what they're saying for two reasons. One, by becoming a purely focused battery manufacturer, Musk becomes platform agnostic and will have a much better chance of licensing his tech and selling his batteries to all auto manufacturers. This could benefit the broader electric vehicle industry as the technology is now available to dozens of well established manufacturers who can produce vehicles on multiple orders of magnitude greater than Tesla could possibly reach in a decade or more. If they do it right, they could make a huge amount of money this route, dominating a key control point in the electric vehicle.
The second thing is that they will continue to be highly constrained in their manufacturing capabilities for a while. I love Tesla and would love to own one of their vehicles, but the company's production system will take at least a decade or two to even get anywhere close to the order of magnitude that more mainstream auto manufacturers are able to make. This may not matter much if you want your Tesla to be unique, but if your goal is to see the mass deployment of electric vehicles in the near future, organically scaling up Tesla may not necessarily be the way to go.
All that being said, I HIGHLY doubt Musk will go in this direction. His MO at other companies has always been platform oriented with tight vertical integration, and I don't see that changing anytime in the near future, not with him at the helm.
I think you make a good point. I do believe there is a welder shortage, but it's for niche or highly experienced areas. Companies allowed the pipeline to dry up, and now they are paying the price and scrambling to make up for years of neglect. Don't think you can make a H1B crisis as easily with welding however: people may be confused or intimidated by what advanced scientific and programming fields do, but welding is one that tends to fall more neatly into traditional territory of organized labor. They may be weakened, but they can fight tooth and nail on that one.
That's a silly statement. They're government bureaucrats. At least in the United States, you never join the bureaucracy if your goal is to make money. Even contracting for the government, while better paying than direct government employment, still pales compared to more lucrative areas of the economy, especially for the skill sets we're talking about.
I'm REALLY curious as to what they expect to replace the coal mining business with in the middle of rural West Virginia. Even assuming you could retrain all those workers, that simply leaves an entire army of now skilled workers sitting in towns that have had their economy completely decimated by the elimination of coal. One doesn't simply regenerate a brand new, magic economy there from scratch. Even something as basic as building a new factory, say a solar panel factory, would require not just the cost of building the factory, but the infrastructure to support said factory (roads, water, power, rail links, etc.), and $50B is not going to cover the cost of doing that for 87,000 workers.
Yes, just in case you haven't been following all the coverage from the last three or four days, the United States has been providing a large amount of satellite data, even leveraging their missile launch detection system to search for possible explosions. The more interesting question is why it took the Chinese this long to provide satellite imagery to search for a plane full of primarily their own citizenry in its own region.
This program is probably focused on members of the bureaucracy, but I wonder if they're going to cover another very significant group of government officials with security clearances: Members of Congress and their staffs. A lot of your leaks happen over on Capitol Hill after all. Then again, I'm going to take a guess that they will very vocally and aggressively oppose this action and play the separation of powers card to shield themselves from this new effort.
The Financial Times [Paywall] is reporting that a highly sophisticated cyberweapon known as Ouroboros is being used to infect, monitor and potentially attack Ukrainian computer networks including government systems. Forensics mark it as being Russian developed, and the article compares it to Stuxnet in terms of sophistication and capability (though it is not related to that specific software). Websites are small potatoes, nothing more than spray paint on a wall. This appears to be more more like explosives, designed to take out targeted infrastructure.
I think an important distinction needs to be made about the difference between Google Glasses versus cellphones, cameras and other more traditional recording devices. With the latter, it's relatively obvious if someone is recording you: the item's lenses are pointed at you. If the cellphone is in their pocket or angled at my feet, it's easy to see it's not pointed at me. It's also easy for me to verify if they are recording me on a cellphone or not, just simply flip the thing around and take a look. With Google Glasses, I have no idea if a person looking at me is simply looking or is actually recording. There's no indication, and it's not quick to spot check; they have to go through the process of actually removing the glasses and showing me. It creates uncertainty on whether or not I'm being recorded, and therefore, creates unease.
That being said, this event seems to be just as much about the whole Techie vs. "Traditional" San Francisco debate which is a whole different can of worms.
Companies have scaled back on on-the-job training because the moment they invest heavily in an employee, said employee will jump ship to another firm. A lot of times too, it's not even for more money, it's for a more prestigious company, hotter product, etc. Why bother trying to train in house talent when they're going to jump ship? Better to just look for someone who is qualified to do the job from the get go.
First, I'm going to say I'm all for reductions in military spending. No objections drawing down the military machine and redeploying those funds to more productive uses for the economy.
However, I do want to address what I view as the misinterpretation that the United States is somehow starving infrastructure and education spending. Contrary to popular belief, the US dumps huge amounts of resources into both. The US spends 3.3% of its GDP on infrastructure, on par with nations like Canada and Germany. In education, the US spend $1,000B a year in education spending, ~$200B more a year on education than on all combined defense, veteran and civil defense spending. I don't think the question for the United States is whether or not the government spends sufficient resources, but it's more a question of how those resources are allocated and spent. It's a question of geographic and socioeconomic distribution as well as effectiveness of spending.
It's good to see some real competition, but it's disappointing that most of the locations chosen are simply further upgrading areas that already have a large tech presence. In some ways, it almost feels like it's further growing the gap between technologically advanced cities and the rest of the country.
This is true, but I would add that there is a real calculus that the Chinese are doing, and if North Korea's new leadership pushes too hard, the Chinese government may find that they'd be better off "forcefully advocating" for new North Korean leadership. The nuclear weapons and recent violent altercations are already making the Chinese uneasy, especially since they give China's neighbors more excuses to pour money into military upgrades... upgrades that can also be used to contest Chinese military supremacy in the region. The Kim Jong Un's recent purges of pro-Chinese factions in the government isn't exactly currying favor either.
No, it's China's view that the DPRK's internal affairs are none of its business until China feels that the DPRK is no longer worth propping up. China is out for China's interest, and they are more than happy to interfere when it's in their national interest, no different than any other major global power. They may not currently have the force projection capabilities that other nations had, but just the sheer number of weapons they've shipped during the PRC's short history to pro-Chinese insurgencies and governments shows that they are not above this game. Perhaps the most blatant was the punitive campaign they launched against Vietnam in 1979, leaving tens of thousands of people dead and "scorched earth" in the northern half of Vietnam, all because the Vietnamese had the audacity to stop the massacres of the pro-PRC Khmer Rouge.
Yet for now, as much of a headache that the DPRK is for China, they put up with them because all of the other options are much less desirable for China (anarchy from regime collapse, war on its frontier, millions of refugees).
When one bothers to actually look at the data, the rank for the United States is still higher than its ranking in 2006, 2007 and 2011. Since 2002, the United States press freedom has bounced back and forth between the 20s and 50s. This is not to say that there isn't merit to the deficits in press freedom that Reporters Without Borders points out; there are very legitimate concerns being raised about recent efforts by the current administration to crack down on leakers and whistleblowers. Yet because Reporters Without Borders is regularly changing their methodology, you can't really use the data to make a true comparison of any nation's change in rank beyond very broad generalizations. Here's a good story in the Washington Post that makes this point.
What makes this particular case even crazier is that they didn't bother to humor him with the sort of token, small dollar amount that most, more established companies will offer when this sort of thing arises (and in this case, the photographer might have actually accepted). Nope, they went straight for the lawsuit.
Can't speak to Target, but for future people who are in this predicament, now you have a great case study and example to point to!
Given everyone raving about evil corporate profits, I wonder if half the commentators even know what a cooperative is. If one simply reads the article, they can see that the members of this co-op are negotiating to try and come up with a better solution.
Except the ISP we're talking about here already is a co-op.
You realize of course what you are proposing is effectively a declaration of war against nearly every major power, essentially stating that diplomatic relations should be severed with the United States, China, Russia and even other EU member states.
I would point out that this argument feels a lot like a variation on Karl Marx's overproduction paradox in capitalist societies. Marx's focus on cause was a little different, he viewed that there would be too many goods ultimately driving down profits and triggering needs for efficiency, but the cycle essentially becomes the same - competition forces increased efficiency to produce products, but increased efficiency reduces labor required and thus fewer employed people who can afford said products. Then, companies are forced to become even more efficient to improve margins, but that just leads to further unemployment and greater numbers of people who can't afford said products. Those issues were partially offset historical circumstance (global warfare) and by the creation of new industries that can partially absorb some of the unemployed (tech boom), but ultimately, the trend seems to still be on the same trajectory.
Wars are a lot easier to get into than out of. Those who ask about exit strategies or question what will happen if assumptions prove wrong are rarely welcome at the conference table when the fire-breathers are demanding that we strike—as they did when advocating invading Iraq, intervening in Libya and Syria, or bombing Iran's nuclear sites. But in recent decades, presidents confronted with tough problems abroad have too often been too quick to reach for a gun. Our foreign and national security policy has become too militarized, the use of force too easy for presidents.
Today, too many ideologues call for U.S. force as the first option rather than a last resort. On the left, we hear about the "responsibility to protect" civilians to justify military intervention in Libya, Syria, Sudan and elsewhere. On the right, the failure to strike Syria or Iran is deemed an abdication of U.S. leadership. And so the rest of the world sees the U.S. as a militaristic country quick to launch planes, cruise missiles and drones deep into sovereign countries or ungoverned spaces. There are limits to what even the strongest and greatest nation on Earth can do—and not every outrage, act of aggression, oppression or crisis should elicit a U.S. military response.
This is particularly worth remembering as technology changes the face of war. A button is pushed in Nevada, and seconds later a pickup truck explodes in Mosul. A bomb destroys the targeted house on the right and leaves the one on the left intact. For too many people—including defense "experts," members of Congress, executive branch officials and ordinary citizens—war has become a kind of videogame or action movie: bloodless, painless and odorless. But my years at the Pentagon left me even more skeptical of systems analysis, computer models, game theories or doctrines that suggest that war is anything other than tragic, inefficient and uncertain.
Should be noted that even back during the Napoleonic era, organized armies struggled with rules and regulations how to deal with irregular forces. The term guerrilla after all came from that era. They struggled with how to treat such individuals and were forced into the same messy counterinsurgency campaigns that you see today (perhaps even uglier since there were less restraints on just outright torching villages and massacring civilians). This wasn't just limited to the French or that time either: you saw this with just about every major civilization throughout the world and most of history as a continuous problem up until today. Any laws or conventions were always thrown out when dealing with unconventional forces, with organized armies feeling "freed" of constraints when dealing with them.
No, but the Brits and the French directly created the monster that came back and bit them in WWII. They decided that at the end of WWI, it was better to screw over the Germans as much as possible, laying the groundwork for the birth of the Nazis. Kind of like how the West is stuck dealing with terrorism now: they screwed with the Middle East for so long that eventually it gave birth to craziness that is now coming after them.