That's why every scrap of historical and literary evidence from that time we have is that that a strange man who claimed he was God in human form was executed and then rose from the dead.
Could you please provide some citations for that assertion. Which scraps of historical and literary evidence are you referring to? Can you point to any evidence aside from the books of the New Testament?
Jesus existed around 30AD as attested to by Jewish historians, Roman historians and the thousands of ancient copies of the New Testament documents that survive
AFAIK Roman records do not mention Jesus at all (funny, given the miracles he supposedly perpetrated - you'd think that he be talked about all over the place). Do you have any specific cites? The only Jewish historian that I've heard mentions Jesus is Josephus , but my understanding is that the accepted view amongst biblical scholars now is that the few lines in Josephus referring to Jesus were inserted by early Christians to bolster their case.
Archaeologists continue to show that the reliability of these documents when talking about historical events is unparalleled.
The bible isn't even internally consistent in its history, let alone consistent with other records of the period (see for example the genealogies linking David and Jesus in Matthew and Luke).
His tomb never became a shrine - a very natural thing to happen if he was still in it....No-one could produce the body....
These things are equally plausible if Jesus didn't exist at all, except as a myth - Mangasarian's "The Truth About Jesus" does a good job of showing how the Jesus story has far more in common with traditional mythic cycles than it does with factual history.
Re:Cost of Lifting Things
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) is probably the most magnificent piece of operational rocketry engineering achieved by man to date
The SSME is probably the most magnificent piece of high performance rocket engineering achieved by man to date. It pushes the limits of what is possible with chemical propulsion. But it achieves that high performance at the cost of incredible complexity, and a design that may be operational, but is certainly not operable (in the sense that it supports overall system operability). I would also dispute the assertion that the SSME is truly capable of "being reused". While it is true that pieces of the engine are flown more than once, an individual SSME is essentially completely disassembled after each flight, and then inspected and rebuilt. That is not what I would call real reuse: you might as well just build a new engine. Ok, the material costs might be a little higher, but you'd potentially save a bunch on having to do fatigue and wear checks on parts that have done a flight or two. A real reusable engine would support multiple flights before needing more than light maintenance, and tens-hundreds of flights before a complete teardown was needed.
This is one of the new technologies that we needed to develop, and without the Space Shuttle it would become unneccessary.
No, it really isn't a necessary technology. It provides performance at the expense of everything else. Good system design requires paying attention to aspects such as reliability, maintainability, operability, and cost, as well as performance. There are existing designs that could do more and better than the shuttle, and cost significantly less. Take a look at "LEO on the Cheap: Methods for Achieving Drastic Reductions In Space Launch Costs" by Lt Col Jack London for examples of some of these designs, as well as a good articulation of the root causes of high launch costs, and the principles and strategies for reducing those costs.
Re:Cost of Lifting Things
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The 3x factor on manned spaceflight costs is largely a result of the shuttle's poor design. A shuttle launch costs more (even factoring in inflation) than a Saturn V launch, and IIRC cannot lift as much mass as a Saturn V. Shuttle has been a mismnagaed boondoggle from the very beginning.
As jobs move overseas the standard of living (and cost of living) in those countries will rise. They will no longer be "third world", and their populations will no longer be willing to work for pennies.
Sounds like you have just given a pretty good rationale for eliminating the minimum wage: it prevents Americans from competing effectively in the global marketplace.
You are correct that "Globalizaton and Capitalism only work when all the markets are free and equal". That's why protectionist policies in the US will be ultimately detrimental to the country. As Adam Smith explained several hundred years ago, those countries that choose to exclude themselves from a free and open market will ultimately lose to those countries that choose to participate in the market. The result will be that the "little people" living in countries that isolate themselves will "get assfucked out of their jobs".
No thanks. I've lived in a country with a nationalized healthcare system. Trust me, for all its flaws, the private model is much better.
Or we can try to drive the cost of the dollar lower
The dollar has been dropping against other world currencies recently. Problem is, while that makes it "cheaper" to hire an American worker, it makes it more expensive to import all the useless crap that worker needs to live and work. Currency values are part of that nifty balancing and resource allocation system known as the market. Trying to manipulate them is asking for trouble.
We could try to cut down the increase in property prices
I would love to see you manage that. Having just moved from LA, I am well aware of what insane property prices are like (thank god I was never in the Bay Area). But it's a supply/demand issue, and I don't think you're going to make it go away. It's not like the US isn't a huge and (especially in the western states) sparsely populated country. There's plenty of land to go around, but instead everyone wants the same small patches of land in SoCal. You should try looking at land prices in places like Utah or Idaho - insanely low!
...wanting to protect the way of life of the average American...
Protectionism won't work. All the wishful thinking in the world won't change the current economic reality. If US companies are prevented from outsourcing to take advantage of cheap labor then companies that can take advantage of that cheap labor will grow up outside the US. Those companies will, unless blocked from US markets, undercut the US competition, which will eventually go out of business. If the outside competitors are blocked from US markets then their US customers will be forced to use the higher-priced American products, thus making the customers unable in their turn to compete with their foreign counterparts (who do have access to the cheap foreign products). "Protect" one industry, and others will suffer. "Protect" them all, and you will have essentially isolated the US from the entire rest of the world, and locked it into high prices and low standards of living. Is that really what you want?
I personally cannot wait for the day when we'll be able to punish the greedy.
Bet there are plenty of people in the world who have exactly the same thought. Except that they most likely include you in the "greedy" category, since you're (I'm inferring from your post) an American. Be careful what you wish for...
The problem, as the grandparent post was trying to point out, is that protectionism is a two-way street. It's not like the other guy is going to sit around and say "Shit, I guess I'll eat cat food, thank God that I'm still a capitalist! I'm just glad my job is going to a patriotic American citizen!" Instead, he'll get protectionist barriers put in place on American goods and services. The resulting tit-for-tat will hike prices everywhere, and generally screw everyone, everywhere.
This is not a new debate. Adam Smith'S "The Wealth of Nations" pretty much demolished the concept of protectionism several centuries ago.
...you try living in Southern California on the salary that these folks in Russia are getting...
So why don't you move to Russia? Ok, maybe that's a little extreme. But you could at least try getting the hell out of SoCal. I just moved out of LA last year. My salary dropped by more than 50%, but my standard of living has actually gone up a little. Not to mention that my quality of life is definitely higher, and my blood pressure is probably much lower now that I'm not having to deal the parking lot known as the 405.
When enough American jobs have been outsourced, there won't be enough American economy left to purchase the luxury products being produced.
At which point America will become the outsourcing destination of choice for all those companies trying to make luxury products for the Indian and Chinese markets. Nothing like a little cheap American labor to help undercut the competition in all those high-cost-of-living places like Bangalore and Beijing...
What are you going to see from outsourced labor? Perhaps a nickel more a year in dividends?
So what you're really saying is that they need to outsource to even cheaper countries, and at the same time charge even higher prices, so that they can make some outrageously high profits and the dividend on my 100 shares will actually amount to something substantial. Right?
I don't think it's that they're scared per se. It's more political than that. If O'Keefe had OK'd a Hubble repair mission (in direct contravention of the CAIB's requirement that all shuttle missions be in station-accessible orbits) and then the shuttle used for that mission had a mishap both NASA and O'Keefe would be in BIG trouble. By doing what he has done O'Keefe has basically managed to pass the buck to some other sucker - Admiral Gehman, head of the CAIB, has been asked to review the Hubble mission for safety. This way if there's a problem O'Keefe and NASA can say "but we did everything that the CAIB said we should, and they even reviewed this mission and said it was fine." Result: Gehman takes a fall, rather than NASA.
Why don't you just use the ftp_conn_track module for ip tables? Then you don't need to leave large ranges of ports open, just the standard ftp port. Once a connection is established the connection tracker will manage opening and closing of ephemeral ports.
If we can detect an asteroid 10 years before it hits us, I'm pretty confident that it'll get handled.
I'm not. I worked on a study where we examined what the options would be for dealing with an asteroid due to hit in 10 years if we detected it today. The bottom line was that it would be really hard to stop. And we could only say it wasn't impossible if we made some convenient assumptions about the composition of the asteroid.
Who knows, maybe an Apollo-scale effort could be mounted to stop the impact. But I wouldn't count on it. It is a hard problem, and sheer manpower dollars may not be enough.
And while I'm not a student of history in the sense that I'm studying history in school, I have read things ranging from "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" to "Guns, Germs, and Steel". I'm also familiar with more recent history, such as the fact that the Japanese kicked US butt in consumer electronics not because they had cheap labor, but because they actually paid attention to W. Edwards Deming, while US manufacturers didn't. A similar thing happened to America's fat, complacent auto industry. In even more recent history, auto jobs have been going back to the US as Japanese manufacturers open US plants in an attempt to capitalize on the political goodwill, lower transportation costs, and the greater productivity of the US workers (vs Japanese workers).
Regardless, I think that you are drawing the wrong historical lesson. The lesson that you should be learning is that the global economy is a dynamic thing, that US companies cannot afford to get complacent, that there's always someone cheaper, or better, or both, and that you can't rely on today's job still being tehre tomorrow, so you'd better damn well make sure that you are as flexible as possible.
BTW, as several other posters have pointed out, "white collar" jobs are professional, office jobs. All of the stuff you refer to in your post would traditionally be classified as "blue collar" jobs.
[sigh] Another outsourcing article, and all I see are the same old arguments. People just don't seem to get it.
The bottom line is that outsourcing is a direct result of the nature of IT and software development: those industries are location-independent. Protectionist trade barriers are not going to help in the long run. If it can be done over a network, it will be. Folks on Slashdot love to talk about telecommuting, and brag about how they can ssh into boxes 100's of miles away to fix problems. The logical extension of that is to locate the people doing the work in a cheap place. All the better if they're already there - then you don't have to pay for moving costs. Ever wonder why service jobs stay in the US? It's because they are location-dependent. They involve providing service to people in a specific location.
With the points above in mind you basically have three options:
Get a job in the service industry
Move to where the jobs are (I currently live 6000 miles from home so that I can work in the field I want to - and no, I'm not Indian, and I don't work in software or IT)
Find a non-service-industry job that is location-dependent and tied to the area you want to live in (I'm working on that one right now)
Of course, none of those are any guarantee of perpetual employment - the world is a dynamic place, and you have to stay on your toes. But they're much better options than just sitting around whining and asking for protectionist legislation that will ultimately hurt the US.
If you had bothered to RTFA you would see that not only has trade increased, but jobs have been created here. So while there may have been a loss of "tens of thousands" of jobs, there has also been an an increase in other jobs, leading to a net gain. And no, I'm not talking about service industry jobs flipping burgers at McDonalds.
Did you bother to read the whole article? Liek for example the part where Friedman talks about Indian companies hiring Americans for certain jobs because the Americans were better than anyone they could get in India? That's not fat cats, that's regular workers getting rteal jobs and making real money.
I don't think so. Return of the King made a clean sweep at the Oscars, taking eleven honors, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Visual Effects, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup, and Best Sound Mixing.
It's not a case of a few more $$ for fuel. It's a case of being able to launch at all. The rovers BARELY made it under the max launch mass. They were even over the max at some points in the program, and were stripping off mass whereever they could. Besides, in the space business additional mechanisms are frowned upon due to both the difficulty of designing a mechanism to work in the space (or martian) environment, and the inherent decrease in relaibility of the overall system. MER already has far more than mechanisms than is usual for a space mission.
Right. Like there's any functional difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. The rhetoric is different, but the effects are the same.
I won't disagree that the vote of the people the underlying problem though. Neither wing of the Republicrats would be in power if people didn't vote them in.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you please provide some citations for that assertion. Which scraps of historical and literary evidence are you referring to? Can you point to any evidence aside from the books of the New Testament?
AFAIK Roman records do not mention Jesus at all (funny, given the miracles he supposedly perpetrated - you'd think that he be talked about all over the place). Do you have any specific cites? The only Jewish historian that I've heard mentions Jesus is Josephus , but my understanding is that the accepted view amongst biblical scholars now is that the few lines in Josephus referring to Jesus were inserted by early Christians to bolster their case.
Archaeologists continue to show that the reliability of these documents when talking about historical events is unparalleled.
The bible isn't even internally consistent in its history, let alone consistent with other records of the period (see for example the genealogies linking David and Jesus in Matthew and Luke).
His tomb never became a shrine - a very natural thing to happen if he was still in it....No-one could produce the body....
These things are equally plausible if Jesus didn't exist at all, except as a myth - Mangasarian's "The Truth About Jesus" does a good job of showing how the Jesus story has far more in common with traditional mythic cycles than it does with factual history.
The SSME is probably the most magnificent piece of high performance rocket engineering achieved by man to date. It pushes the limits of what is possible with chemical propulsion. But it achieves that high performance at the cost of incredible complexity, and a design that may be operational, but is certainly not operable (in the sense that it supports overall system operability). I would also dispute the assertion that the SSME is truly capable of "being reused". While it is true that pieces of the engine are flown more than once, an individual SSME is essentially completely disassembled after each flight, and then inspected and rebuilt. That is not what I would call real reuse: you might as well just build a new engine. Ok, the material costs might be a little higher, but you'd potentially save a bunch on having to do fatigue and wear checks on parts that have done a flight or two. A real reusable engine would support multiple flights before needing more than light maintenance, and tens-hundreds of flights before a complete teardown was needed.
This is one of the new technologies that we needed to develop, and without the Space Shuttle it would become unneccessary.
No, it really isn't a necessary technology. It provides performance at the expense of everything else. Good system design requires paying attention to aspects such as reliability, maintainability, operability, and cost, as well as performance. There are existing designs that could do more and better than the shuttle, and cost significantly less. Take a look at "LEO on the Cheap: Methods for Achieving Drastic Reductions In Space Launch Costs" by Lt Col Jack London for examples of some of these designs, as well as a good articulation of the root causes of high launch costs, and the principles and strategies for reducing those costs.
The 3x factor on manned spaceflight costs is largely a result of the shuttle's poor design. A shuttle launch costs more (even factoring in inflation) than a Saturn V launch, and IIRC cannot lift as much mass as a Saturn V. Shuttle has been a mismnagaed boondoggle from the very beginning.
No thanks. I've lived in a country with a nationalized healthcare system. Trust me, for all its flaws, the private model is much better.
Or we can try to drive the cost of the dollar lower
The dollar has been dropping against other world currencies recently. Problem is, while that makes it "cheaper" to hire an American worker, it makes it more expensive to import all the useless crap that worker needs to live and work. Currency values are part of that nifty balancing and resource allocation system known as the market. Trying to manipulate them is asking for trouble.
We could try to cut down the increase in property prices
I would love to see you manage that. Having just moved from LA, I am well aware of what insane property prices are like (thank god I was never in the Bay Area). But it's a supply/demand issue, and I don't think you're going to make it go away. It's not like the US isn't a huge and (especially in the western states) sparsely populated country. There's plenty of land to go around, but instead everyone wants the same small patches of land in SoCal. You should try looking at land prices in places like Utah or Idaho - insanely low!
Protectionism won't work. All the wishful thinking in the world won't change the current economic reality. If US companies are prevented from outsourcing to take advantage of cheap labor then companies that can take advantage of that cheap labor will grow up outside the US. Those companies will, unless blocked from US markets, undercut the US competition, which will eventually go out of business. If the outside competitors are blocked from US markets then their US customers will be forced to use the higher-priced American products, thus making the customers unable in their turn to compete with their foreign counterparts (who do have access to the cheap foreign products). "Protect" one industry, and others will suffer. "Protect" them all, and you will have essentially isolated the US from the entire rest of the world, and locked it into high prices and low standards of living. Is that really what you want?
I personally cannot wait for the day when we'll be able to punish the greedy.
Bet there are plenty of people in the world who have exactly the same thought. Except that they most likely include you in the "greedy" category, since you're (I'm inferring from your post) an American. Be careful what you wish for...
This is not a new debate. Adam Smith'S "The Wealth of Nations" pretty much demolished the concept of protectionism several centuries ago.
Or you could try moving to another country where the cost of living is lower...
So why don't you move to Russia? Ok, maybe that's a little extreme. But you could at least try getting the hell out of SoCal. I just moved out of LA last year. My salary dropped by more than 50%, but my standard of living has actually gone up a little. Not to mention that my quality of life is definitely higher, and my blood pressure is probably much lower now that I'm not having to deal the parking lot known as the 405.
At which point America will become the outsourcing destination of choice for all those companies trying to make luxury products for the Indian and Chinese markets. Nothing like a little cheap American labor to help undercut the competition in all those high-cost-of-living places like Bangalore and Beijing...
So what you're really saying is that they need to outsource to even cheaper countries, and at the same time charge even higher prices, so that they can make some outrageously high profits and the dividend on my 100 shares will actually amount to something substantial. Right?
Sounds like "luck" had very little to do with it.
I don't think it's that they're scared per se. It's more political than that. If O'Keefe had OK'd a Hubble repair mission (in direct contravention of the CAIB's requirement that all shuttle missions be in station-accessible orbits) and then the shuttle used for that mission had a mishap both NASA and O'Keefe would be in BIG trouble. By doing what he has done O'Keefe has basically managed to pass the buck to some other sucker - Admiral Gehman, head of the CAIB, has been asked to review the Hubble mission for safety. This way if there's a problem O'Keefe and NASA can say "but we did everything that the CAIB said we should, and they even reviewed this mission and said it was fine." Result: Gehman takes a fall, rather than NASA.
Why don't you just use the ftp_conn_track module for ip tables? Then you don't need to leave large ranges of ports open, just the standard ftp port. Once a connection is established the connection tracker will manage opening and closing of ephemeral ports.
I'm not. I worked on a study where we examined what the options would be for dealing with an asteroid due to hit in 10 years if we detected it today. The bottom line was that it would be really hard to stop. And we could only say it wasn't impossible if we made some convenient assumptions about the composition of the asteroid.
Who knows, maybe an Apollo-scale effort could be mounted to stop the impact. But I wouldn't count on it. It is a hard problem, and sheer manpower dollars may not be enough.
And while I'm not a student of history in the sense that I'm studying history in school, I have read things ranging from "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" to "Guns, Germs, and Steel". I'm also familiar with more recent history, such as the fact that the Japanese kicked US butt in consumer electronics not because they had cheap labor, but because they actually paid attention to W. Edwards Deming, while US manufacturers didn't. A similar thing happened to America's fat, complacent auto industry. In even more recent history, auto jobs have been going back to the US as Japanese manufacturers open US plants in an attempt to capitalize on the political goodwill, lower transportation costs, and the greater productivity of the US workers (vs Japanese workers).
Regardless, I think that you are drawing the wrong historical lesson. The lesson that you should be learning is that the global economy is a dynamic thing, that US companies cannot afford to get complacent, that there's always someone cheaper, or better, or both, and that you can't rely on today's job still being tehre tomorrow, so you'd better damn well make sure that you are as flexible as possible .
BTW, as several other posters have pointed out, "white collar" jobs are professional, office jobs. All of the stuff you refer to in your post would traditionally be classified as "blue collar" jobs.
Yeah, pretty much everyone seems to use UML these days...
Ha ha. Very funny. But the options were "service industry" OR "move to where the jobs are". Not do both. And what makes you think my home is the US?
The bottom line is that outsourcing is a direct result of the nature of IT and software development: those industries are location-independent. Protectionist trade barriers are not going to help in the long run. If it can be done over a network, it will be. Folks on Slashdot love to talk about telecommuting, and brag about how they can ssh into boxes 100's of miles away to fix problems. The logical extension of that is to locate the people doing the work in a cheap place. All the better if they're already there - then you don't have to pay for moving costs. Ever wonder why service jobs stay in the US? It's because they are location-dependent. They involve providing service to people in a specific location.
With the points above in mind you basically have three options:
- Get a job in the service industry
- Move to where the jobs are (I currently live 6000 miles from home so that I can work in the field I want to - and no, I'm not Indian, and I don't work in software or IT)
- Find a non-service-industry job that is location-dependent and tied to the area you want to live in (I'm working on that one right now)
Of course, none of those are any guarantee of perpetual employment - the world is a dynamic place, and you have to stay on your toes. But they're much better options than just sitting around whining and asking for protectionist legislation that will ultimately hurt the US.If you had bothered to RTFA you would see that not only has trade increased, but jobs have been created here. So while there may have been a loss of "tens of thousands" of jobs, there has also been an an increase in other jobs, leading to a net gain. And no, I'm not talking about service industry jobs flipping burgers at McDonalds.
Did you bother to read the whole article? Liek for example the part where Friedman talks about Indian companies hiring Americans for certain jobs because the Americans were better than anyone they could get in India? That's not fat cats, that's regular workers getting rteal jobs and making real money.
I don't think so. Return of the King made a clean sweep at the Oscars, taking eleven honors, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Visual Effects, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup, and Best Sound Mixing.
It's not a case of a few more $$ for fuel. It's a case of being able to launch at all. The rovers BARELY made it under the max launch mass. They were even over the max at some points in the program, and were stripping off mass whereever they could. Besides, in the space business additional mechanisms are frowned upon due to both the difficulty of designing a mechanism to work in the space (or martian) environment, and the inherent decrease in relaibility of the overall system. MER already has far more than mechanisms than is usual for a space mission.
I won't disagree that the vote of the people the underlying problem though. Neither wing of the Republicrats would be in power if people didn't vote them in.