where they spent over $280,000 for each job created or saved.
I don't know why people find this surprising. Obviously you can't build a road for just the cost of labor, teachers need classrooms to teach in, etc. Of course the rest of that money still goes to pay somebody, such as whoever sells construction supplies or maintains the classroom, but you aren't counting that, simply to make the numbers look worse.
As for the shovel-ready projects that weren't actually ready, that portion of the stimulus was never spent, so that should make you feel a little better.
As for healthcare, private and public healthcare in the US are in exactly the same mess, which is that we simply refuse to make any rational cost/benefit decisions about healthcare, and over-treat everybody, even lost causes.
In previous decades, alternative computing hardware never made sense economically. Sequential, digital, uniform memory access computers had been progressing so rapidly that special-purpose parallel/connectionist machines were obsolete almost before they hit the market. Now we are hitting the physical limits of the conventional architecture, which may create niches for alternate ones. (Arguably, GPUs already prove this point.)
No, actually I think there will be many good applications for this style of processing regardless of biologically accurate it is. Massive parallelism, co-locating data and computation, some analog computation perhaps... these are directions that computation is taking due to the breakdown of the Von Neumann architecture due to physical limits. Nobody expects (I hope) this new chip to compute anything that couldn't already be done - eventually - on a conventional desktop PC. But if it's possible to drastically increase computational efficiency (cost, power, size) people start thinking about applications and algorithms that were previously out of reach with the resources they had.
Because it also captures ambient light from external sources into energy. (Outdoors, energy from sunlight would vastly outweigh anything recaptured from the backlight). Perhaps you could make an e-reader that *never* needs recharging under typical usage patterns. The Kindle already lasts a long time, but dispensing with the charging apparatus altogether would be pretty cool.
Apparently the ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle and JAXA's H-II Transfer vehicle can also resupply the ISS, so the Russians do not have a lock on unmanned missions to it. I wonder when Dragon will be ready for human "payload"?
As soon as the police insert themselves into the equation, the social dynamics will change and eventually invalidate their predictions.
That's the goal. The whole purported reason for putting traffic cameras at intersections with lots of crashes is to make people more cautious to reduce the crashes.
Or is the argument just, "why fight crime when you can never eradicate it?"
Yeah, no. There was no prospect for advancement for a medieval serf, no matter how hard they worked.
Oh, I'm sure there was the occasional rags-to-riches tale to give people hope. A poor maiden marrying a prince, or somebody finding some magic beans, or something. And if not, there was always your mansion in paradise constructed with each act of servitude here on earth, which is just a short an insignificant sojourn after all.
Of course what we are talking about is just "monopoly" in different words. The king owned all the land, therefore he "deserved" all the income, by definition. What are you going to do, use coercion to dispossess him of what he inherited fair and square? There are many, many people who believe that whatever happens as a result of market forces is Right, by definition. And monopolies, well, you know, they're really just the unintended consequences of government meddling and/or regulatory capture anyways. Isn't that convenient?
What, don't you think the pirates have the moral right to the "land" and property, if they're strong enough to take it? Survival of the fittest and all that.
Reading the headline, I assumed this "nation" would just be a data and banking haven, i.e. a legal ploy to avoid paying taxes. But reading the article, no, it appears to be a libertarian utopian fantasy straight out from Ayn Rand.
To be honest, I'm afraid it's NOT impossible. This is basically what castles were in the middle ages, havens where kings and their close beneficiaries could do whatever they pleased. For that matter, peons could too - within the limits of the freedom afforded by their station in life, which was zilch. (But maybe if they just worked a bit harder...)
Agreed; Apple has never established a monopoly in the way that Microsoft did. Once you've built your entire enterprise and customized software around Windows, they own you. By contrast, Apple is in a much more tenuous position - they'll going down the minute they stop being better than the competition.
It seems like there's a rash of articles lately assuming Berners-Lee patented the web as we know it. He didn't. What he invented is implemented by a tiny fraction of the code for a modern web browser. So you have to get much more specific about which of his innovations were patentable at the time, and what alternative technologies were available for those.
you stole something under threat of state violence.
Land ownership was never absolute nor should it be. He didn't create the land, he's not the first critter to squat there, and he won't be the last. If he thought he had legal entitlements he actually did not, that's his own fault. Especially when he tried to enforce it.
This isn't civil unrest, which carries with it a political connotation, so much as it is criminal endeavor.
I think the two may be related. Not because people wake up and think, "I'm disenfranchised, so I'm going to go join the riot and loot as a show of my dissatisfaction." But rather, you get young men who are unemployed and bored, who aren't all that worried about getting picked up on CCTV (because they don't have a good-paying job to be fired from); to whom the idea of a new TV is pretty exciting (because they don't have enough money in the bank to buy one). Here you have a criminal in the making. He may realize he is "disenfranchised" and protest peacefully, or he may simply smash a window and grab a TV. Obviously peaceful protest is preferable, but it is also much less clear how it would have any tangible result. In America, anyways, we have many more movies about anti-heroes who simply take what they want, than peaceful protestors who achieve change through nonviolent protest. If anything we tend to view protesters as whiners who would already have what they want if they just worked harder for it.
This blows me away, too. Maybe it's as stupid as it sounds. On the other hand, maybe all the action isn't in California and Florida any more? Maybe they know practically no Americans will make the trip and they ran the numbers and found out they don't care?
We didn't have any trouble crediting Twitter for the Green Spring unrest in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Iran, Libya, and Syria. Can't people see the parallels here with what's happening in London? The technology itself doesn't care whether you agree with the protesters. But in any case, civil unrest usually follows a decline in the economic situation (yes, it was caused at least as much by high food prices as "yearning for freedom" in the middle east), and Britain fits that pattern.
You are talking about the spark, but what about the tinderbox? What does the unrest in London have in common with the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia? And for that matter the Watts riots of 1965 and LA riots of 1992? The rioters are always suffering poor economic prospects. January, 2011: youth unemployment hits record high in Britain. Of course, in the west we cheer on the "green spring" and assume it is about religion and "freedom" as we interpret it. But if that were it, what about China? It's simple: people rarely engage in risky behavior for idealism alone. Not for freedom, and not against unjustified shootings. The risk/reward ratio for smashing a window and stealing a TV is vastly different for somebody making a good living vs. somebody scraping along on the dole with too much time on their hands. No, I am not excusing lawbreaking. Instead, consider it a good statistical predictor: the less somebody is invested in the system, the more likely they are to honor its restrictions.
An example of this would be "smart roads," as people were calling them about 15 years ago, where you lay wires into the roads, which are basically virtual rails they can follow. This eases automation to an incredible degree vs. the high-end computer vision approach. For the foreseeable future of course it would only be built into expensive, high-volume roads that get resurfaced fairly frequently.
It's all closeups because it's really just a commercial, a tease for the exhibit at the museum.
Switching power sources will help polution and eventually cost, but not congestion. There's a limit on the density achievable by big vehicles moving independently. That said, the US is not one of the more dense nations around and won't be anytime soon (our own population growth has now shifted to places like Texas that are less overcrowded) so I would be surprised if it isn't China that takes the lead in this. (High speed rail counts, sort of, but I'm really thinking of something more individualized, taking each party to their own destination).
We know the soviets cheated in the Olympics (lots of steroids), and if the Chinese were cheating in gymnastics, odds are they were probably cheating in other sports as well.
Marion Lois Jones (born October 12, 1975), also known as Marion Jones-Thompson, is a former world champion track and field athlete, and a former professional basketball player for Tulsa Shock in the WNBA. She won five medals at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia but has since forfeited all medals and prizes dating back to September 2000 after admitting that she took performance-enhancing drugs.[1][2]
While we're bashing, did anybody else find the itworld story horribly written? Check out this paragraph:
The chief executive of the International Cyber Security Protection Alliance (ICSPA) - sort of a law-enforcement version of NATO charged with helping member countries track and fight online attacks - said the McAfee report makes the threat of cyberwarfare irrefutable, apparently to those few people computer-savvy enough to spell "Internet" correctly without knowing that connecting "Internet" and "security" makes a cliched oxymoron more popular and more accurate even than pairing "military" and "intelligence."
Huh? It's like he set out to say something and got lost halfway through.
The question you should be asking is, why are Americans still so much better off than almost all of the nations you listed when they stomp us on every standardized test imaginable? You listed the surprising example of Japan, which peaked over 20 years ago! They're an intelligent, well-organized nation that seemed to have a miraculous economy for a decade or two until all the other Asian tigers started to catch up with them, because there was nothing about their industry that couldn't be replicated elsewhere. You think the US feels threatened by China, just consider Japan, and their similar-but-far-larger neighbor next door! Look at US exports to China, and what a large - and growing - proportion of that is "crude materials." If we were a resource-poor nation that wedge would be gone. Now look at our huge agricultural exports, and how many of the nations you listed aren't even self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs! Sure, high-tech farming helps, but you still need land and water. Now consider US law and politics, which were founded on egalitarian, agrarian society. This was possible because there was enough land for everybody to be a landowner, in contrast with Europe where everything was already owned by somebody and wealth (and thus political power) had concentrated on land owners over the centuries. At the very least, you must concede that the height of US power - post WWII - was facilitated by not being destroyed in the war while our main economic competitors were, thanks largely to geography.
As you said, this building is made from oil, and boy, Saudi Arabia sure is lucky to have lots of it. But wait a minute, US dominance was largely built on our own abundant natural resources in the first place, so how is it unfair that some faraway nation have a little slice of the earth for itself? I think a lot of what we attribute to our superior economic system, or work ethic, or diversity (or maybe we don't attribute it to anything, and simply take for granted that we are #1 and always will be) is actually very predictable based on the discovery of the world's largest stockpile of undeveloped natural resources in 1492.
A new resource is discovered or developed, it is exploited resulting in growth, then it peters out. Look at how population growth within the US has shifted from California to Texas in the last decade. Some say it is mostly superior governance, I say it is mostly cheap land.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why people find this surprising. Obviously you can't build a road for just the cost of labor, teachers need classrooms to teach in, etc. Of course the rest of that money still goes to pay somebody, such as whoever sells construction supplies or maintains the classroom, but you aren't counting that, simply to make the numbers look worse.
As for the shovel-ready projects that weren't actually ready, that portion of the stimulus was never spent, so that should make you feel a little better.
As for healthcare, private and public healthcare in the US are in exactly the same mess, which is that we simply refuse to make any rational cost/benefit decisions about healthcare, and over-treat everybody, even lost causes.
In previous decades, alternative computing hardware never made sense economically. Sequential, digital, uniform memory access computers had been progressing so rapidly that special-purpose parallel/connectionist machines were obsolete almost before they hit the market. Now we are hitting the physical limits of the conventional architecture, which may create niches for alternate ones. (Arguably, GPUs already prove this point.)
No, actually I think there will be many good applications for this style of processing regardless of biologically accurate it is. Massive parallelism, co-locating data and computation, some analog computation perhaps... these are directions that computation is taking due to the breakdown of the Von Neumann architecture due to physical limits. Nobody expects (I hope) this new chip to compute anything that couldn't already be done - eventually - on a conventional desktop PC. But if it's possible to drastically increase computational efficiency (cost, power, size) people start thinking about applications and algorithms that were previously out of reach with the resources they had.
Because it also captures ambient light from external sources into energy. (Outdoors, energy from sunlight would vastly outweigh anything recaptured from the backlight). Perhaps you could make an e-reader that *never* needs recharging under typical usage patterns. The Kindle already lasts a long time, but dispensing with the charging apparatus altogether would be pretty cool.
Wow, is that Australian for "web mail"? My opinion of their marketing skills just took a hit. "Hey everybody, have a pigeon hole!"
Apparently the ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle and JAXA's H-II Transfer vehicle can also resupply the ISS, so the Russians do not have a lock on unmanned missions to it. I wonder when Dragon will be ready for human "payload"?
That's the goal. The whole purported reason for putting traffic cameras at intersections with lots of crashes is to make people more cautious to reduce the crashes.
Or is the argument just, "why fight crime when you can never eradicate it?"
Oh, I'm sure there was the occasional rags-to-riches tale to give people hope. A poor maiden marrying a prince, or somebody finding some magic beans, or something. And if not, there was always your mansion in paradise constructed with each act of servitude here on earth, which is just a short an insignificant sojourn after all.
Of course what we are talking about is just "monopoly" in different words. The king owned all the land, therefore he "deserved" all the income, by definition. What are you going to do, use coercion to dispossess him of what he inherited fair and square? There are many, many people who believe that whatever happens as a result of market forces is Right, by definition. And monopolies, well, you know, they're really just the unintended consequences of government meddling and/or regulatory capture anyways. Isn't that convenient?
Reading the headline, I assumed this "nation" would just be a data and banking haven, i.e. a legal ploy to avoid paying taxes. But reading the article, no, it appears to be a libertarian utopian fantasy straight out from Ayn Rand.
To be honest, I'm afraid it's NOT impossible. This is basically what castles were in the middle ages, havens where kings and their close beneficiaries could do whatever they pleased. For that matter, peons could too - within the limits of the freedom afforded by their station in life, which was zilch. (But maybe if they just worked a bit harder...)
Agreed; Apple has never established a monopoly in the way that Microsoft did. Once you've built your entire enterprise and customized software around Windows, they own you. By contrast, Apple is in a much more tenuous position - they'll going down the minute they stop being better than the competition.
It seems like there's a rash of articles lately assuming Berners-Lee patented the web as we know it. He didn't. What he invented is implemented by a tiny fraction of the code for a modern web browser. So you have to get much more specific about which of his innovations were patentable at the time, and what alternative technologies were available for those.
Land ownership was never absolute nor should it be. He didn't create the land, he's not the first critter to squat there, and he won't be the last. If he thought he had legal entitlements he actually did not, that's his own fault. Especially when he tried to enforce it.
As for the "lying, theiving, completely dishonest Chinese" nobody is forcing Apple to put their manufacturing there.
I think the two may be related. Not because people wake up and think, "I'm disenfranchised, so I'm going to go join the riot and loot as a show of my dissatisfaction." But rather, you get young men who are unemployed and bored, who aren't all that worried about getting picked up on CCTV (because they don't have a good-paying job to be fired from); to whom the idea of a new TV is pretty exciting (because they don't have enough money in the bank to buy one). Here you have a criminal in the making. He may realize he is "disenfranchised" and protest peacefully, or he may simply smash a window and grab a TV. Obviously peaceful protest is preferable, but it is also much less clear how it would have any tangible result. In America, anyways, we have many more movies about anti-heroes who simply take what they want, than peaceful protestors who achieve change through nonviolent protest. If anything we tend to view protesters as whiners who would already have what they want if they just worked harder for it.
These things happen, life goes on, brand names recover...
This blows me away, too. Maybe it's as stupid as it sounds. On the other hand, maybe all the action isn't in California and Florida any more? Maybe they know practically no Americans will make the trip and they ran the numbers and found out they don't care?
We didn't have any trouble crediting Twitter for the Green Spring unrest in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Iran, Libya, and Syria. Can't people see the parallels here with what's happening in London? The technology itself doesn't care whether you agree with the protesters. But in any case, civil unrest usually follows a decline in the economic situation (yes, it was caused at least as much by high food prices as "yearning for freedom" in the middle east), and Britain fits that pattern.
...uh, the less likely they are to obey its restrictions. (doh!)
You are talking about the spark, but what about the tinderbox? What does the unrest in London have in common with the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia? And for that matter the Watts riots of 1965 and LA riots of 1992? The rioters are always suffering poor economic prospects. January, 2011: youth unemployment hits record high in Britain. Of course, in the west we cheer on the "green spring" and assume it is about religion and "freedom" as we interpret it. But if that were it, what about China? It's simple: people rarely engage in risky behavior for idealism alone. Not for freedom, and not against unjustified shootings. The risk/reward ratio for smashing a window and stealing a TV is vastly different for somebody making a good living vs. somebody scraping along on the dole with too much time on their hands. No, I am not excusing lawbreaking. Instead, consider it a good statistical predictor: the less somebody is invested in the system, the more likely they are to honor its restrictions.
An example of this would be "smart roads," as people were calling them about 15 years ago, where you lay wires into the roads, which are basically virtual rails they can follow. This eases automation to an incredible degree vs. the high-end computer vision approach. For the foreseeable future of course it would only be built into expensive, high-volume roads that get resurfaced fairly frequently.
Switching power sources will help polution and eventually cost, but not congestion. There's a limit on the density achievable by big vehicles moving independently. That said, the US is not one of the more dense nations around and won't be anytime soon (our own population growth has now shifted to places like Texas that are less overcrowded) so I would be surprised if it isn't China that takes the lead in this. (High speed rail counts, sort of, but I'm really thinking of something more individualized, taking each party to their own destination).
Darn commie cheaters!
Huh? It's like he set out to say something and got lost halfway through.
The question you should be asking is, why are Americans still so much better off than almost all of the nations you listed when they stomp us on every standardized test imaginable? You listed the surprising example of Japan, which peaked over 20 years ago! They're an intelligent, well-organized nation that seemed to have a miraculous economy for a decade or two until all the other Asian tigers started to catch up with them, because there was nothing about their industry that couldn't be replicated elsewhere. You think the US feels threatened by China, just consider Japan, and their similar-but-far-larger neighbor next door! Look at US exports to China, and what a large - and growing - proportion of that is "crude materials." If we were a resource-poor nation that wedge would be gone. Now look at our huge agricultural exports, and how many of the nations you listed aren't even self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs! Sure, high-tech farming helps, but you still need land and water. Now consider US law and politics, which were founded on egalitarian, agrarian society. This was possible because there was enough land for everybody to be a landowner, in contrast with Europe where everything was already owned by somebody and wealth (and thus political power) had concentrated on land owners over the centuries. At the very least, you must concede that the height of US power - post WWII - was facilitated by not being destroyed in the war while our main economic competitors were, thanks largely to geography.
As you said, this building is made from oil, and boy, Saudi Arabia sure is lucky to have lots of it. But wait a minute, US dominance was largely built on our own abundant natural resources in the first place, so how is it unfair that some faraway nation have a little slice of the earth for itself? I think a lot of what we attribute to our superior economic system, or work ethic, or diversity (or maybe we don't attribute it to anything, and simply take for granted that we are #1 and always will be) is actually very predictable based on the discovery of the world's largest stockpile of undeveloped natural resources in 1492. A new resource is discovered or developed, it is exploited resulting in growth, then it peters out. Look at how population growth within the US has shifted from California to Texas in the last decade. Some say it is mostly superior governance, I say it is mostly cheap land.