The West is closer to a Communist society than it ever was, including 1968. Every angle of discussion always leads to more control from authority, more sharedness, more equalness, more restraint, more force, more coercion. This is troubling.
Look at now vs 1000 years ago, or vs 25 years ago, and tell me the proportion of people living under kings, dictators, communism, facism, is not shrinking.
Why do we want all living humans to live in equal standards of living?
But almost nobody is arguing for this! Practically everybody agrees that people must have incentives to make them more productive. And some want to work 90 hours a week to have a big house, while others prefer a more laid-back yet frugal lifestyle. Communism is not making a comeback. Socialism in western societies simply defines a safety net, a lower bound of human existence, which is not intended to satisfy people. And at the upper end, practically nobody is arguing that the janitor and the CEO should be paid the same. Now, whether that pay ratio should be 10, or 100, or 1000, or even more, that people are questioning (especially in recent cases where Wall Street is reaping huge rewards for destructive actions). The accrual of wealth by inheritance rather than merit is something people question. Monopolization of natural resources is something people question. But nobody I've ever known wanted Coke and McDonald's to be nationalized in the hopes the government could do what they do better.
Is there something you find to be untrue about what you wrote above, or do you just not like it?
It would be wonderful if we could all live wild and free, our gluttony not constrained by physical realities. But the fact is, we are sharing this planet. As the number of people and their inter-connectedness continues to increase, the attitudes you describe are inevitable - the have-nots aren't just going to sit there and watch us carry on. They're not that stupid.
seriously? just buy what you're told, don't you... get a grip and lose the manifesto
Not all of economics is zero-sum, but some is. If the acreage, oil, and water of the earth were equally divided among everybody on the planet, I guarantee you wouldn't have people like Ted Turner owning "two million acres (8,000 km), greater than the land areas of Delaware and Rhode Island combined."
I'm not even sure my modest 1/2 acre in a suburb could be had by each (globally), when you consider that much of the world's acreage is inhospitable climates. I suppose most of the acreage "used" by my family is not what we live on, but the farmland, ranch-land, forests, mines, aquifer, etc. devoted to supplying resources for our consumption.
That said, a lot of people seem to like living densely populated, at least when the economic advantages are factored in.
Heh, not sure if you were being sarcastic or not. But although I support nuclear power, maintaining long-term credibility and safety does require regulation, and action to follow through when the regulations are not met. Nothing could discredit the nuclear industry more than letting things slide. (The fact nobody thinks to make any long-term changes every time another couple dozen coal miners are buried alive is a separate issue...)
I wonder? Obviously they will predominate the installed base for a long time, since poor people don't waste working stuff like we do. But looking across the room with a 10 year old 27" Trinitron CRT at one and and a 46" Bravia LCD at the other, it's not at all obvious that the older one would be cheaper to produce. I'm sure the CRT factories are all paid off, but look at raw materials and shipping costs. The CRT has this huge vacuum tube made of glass with a high lead content. Last holiday season I got a 21" 1080p computer monitor for under $100; I don't remember ever paying so little for a CRT that size even when they were decades-old technology.
I can see why manufacturers are terrified when the new thing is not only better, but also cheaper than the old. But ultimately that's the basis of most economic growth.
In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut advances the theory that the perception of time is simply a limitation built into us - that everything from all times simply exists, but we can only sample it monotonically (like a flat-bed scanner head moving along).
If the universe were deterministic, then time is essentially meaningless even if it exists, since the start state and dynamics are all you need to know. And if the dynamics are information-preserving, any state (not just the start state) suffices. Apparently there are even deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics, although I really don't know what that means.
Some of us have computers that can handle 1080p at 60, or even 120fps.
Do the newer 120 and 240 hz LCD TVs actually accept a 240 hz signal? My impression is they are just upsampling from the 60 hz signal. Can you set the refresh rate on your computer to 240 hz for them?
This is essentially the same problem that desktop linux has.
The same problem, and the same strength.
Centralized has some advantages over decentralized, and some disadvantages. If linux were just RedHat, it could never have become Ubuntu. On the other hand, it's frustrating when even copy/paste doesn't always work:)
For those of you who don't know, "Social Security" deductions are immediately used to pay current beneficiaries and whatever else the current crop of congresscritters wants to spend it on. There is nothing put aside to pay for my "Social Security". The bottom has to fall out of this system eventually.
Ultimately, in old age each generation must be cared for by the next. The rest is just accounting. Whether your entitlement is in the form of a government-backed currency that you trust will be redeemable for goods and services when you need them, or whether the entitlement is in the form of a promise that the next generation will be taxed to support you, it doesn't make all that much difference. In other words, the difficulties of Social Security are directly due to a decline in the number of workers for each retiree, so the same problem would manifest even if we were all preparing for retirement by buying stocks instead of paying into SS.
The President doesn't have that much power. Love or hate Obama and what he wanted to do, but if it were just up to him, some sort of health care legislation would have passed by now.
And as for giving people an equal share of political influence, just last week the activist conservative Supreme Court just gave corporations the A-OK to spend as much as they like influencing elections.
I don't think you should have been troll-modded into oblivion, since quite a few seem to feel that way, judging by the volume level from teabaggers.
However, are any of those government failures worse than their equivalent in the private sector?
1) Social Security: companies are dropping pension plans, and now, even suspending 401k's. Private investment (Wall Street) = a negative return over the last 10 years (unless you work at Goldman Sachs. Call me when govt. SS administrators are writing themselves checks for multi-million dollar bonuses).
2) Medicare: companies are reducing and dropping health plans or increasing rates, almost universally.
3) Fannie and Freddie: did no worse than any of the banks, i.e. terrible.
4) Dept of Education: not even sure what to compare to in the private market. Without public education the US would truly revert to the dark ages.
5) Stimulus: without govt backing the banking sector followed by the rest of the economy would have collapsed, period. The rest of the stimulus succeeds in proportion to how much is spent, but it's small relative to the whole economy, so the effect is small.
6) War on drugs: yes it's a fail, but it's also a very hard problem. Just legalizing pot wouldn't fix it all.
My point is that intentionally slaughtering civilians is at least as bad as using them as human shields.
I'm not arguing we're still doing that in Afghanistan. Then again, we're not in a position to benefit from doing so. If the US were being invaded and occupied by a vastly superior alien force, we would be in a different situation and would almost certainly use different tactics. People can rationalize anything, and Americans are not inherently different than anybody else. Look how many of us suddenly embraced torturing prisoners of war.
Look at what partisans did in ww2. Did they fight out in town centres?... No, The US goes to great length to prevent civilian casualties - They may not be perfect but I really don't like this idea that they are somehow as bad as the Taliban in their regard for human life.
In WWII the US did intentionally slaughter a couple hundred thousand civilians in Dresden and Japan (nukes). Without even entering the issue of whether that was justified, it's just not true to say we always avoided targeting civilians.
That's a broad statement, it all depends on where you studied. If your course includes a lot of group work you are going to get a better feel for the social aspects.
Come to think of it, what was really lacking in all the group projects I ever did in school was that none was large enough it wasn't easier to just do myself, whereas real-world projects you simply can't. That changes everything.
Then there are those that include industry projects
A fair point. The mechanical engineering school where I did my bachelor's degree had a "capstone project" that was larger scale than any of my class projects in CS.
All that said, I don't think it's bad to learn theory in school, and pick up experience later, at work. Most school time should be spent learning things you won't just "pick up" later. And if you really want work experience during school, get a job.
The other thing an education in C.S. does not give you is the social aspect of code development, i.e. working in a team. In practice, a lot of coding is having you advocate and defend your design, and/or conform to others' designs when it doesn't go your way, and working with large pre-existing code bases.
Schools are aware of this and they do try, but IMHO it just can't be done for real in that setting.
Getting involved in an open source project over a significant period of time is a better way.
We're not talking about re-purposing limbs, we're talking about changing the number of limbs completely.
I'm not. Arms are not legs. The fact that some large land animals (us & our near relatives) went from 4 to 2 casts doubt on the idea that 6 would be better than 4.
Here are a few reasons why better manufacturer warranties might not increase the price and are better than aftermarket warranties:
1) by improving sales, thus amortizing the upfront design / manufacturing costs over more units
2) aftermarket warranties are more likely to be bought only be people who have some reason to suspect they might "accidentally" need to use it - a high risk pool. You don't want to be in that pool if you're really just a normal user with no intent of abuse or fraud.
3) aftermarket warranties give the manufacturer little incentive to reduce the number of claims by increasing the quality of the product, because they don't bear the cost. Actions speak louder than words; if you want me to think you build quality, don't quote me a high MTBF, offer me a long warranty.
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Yeah I don't get it, when somebody comissions an artwork, don't they therefore own the artwork? In this case that would be all of us.
Look at now vs 1000 years ago, or vs 25 years ago, and tell me the proportion of people living under kings, dictators, communism, facism, is not shrinking.
Why do we want all living humans to live in equal standards of living?
But almost nobody is arguing for this! Practically everybody agrees that people must have incentives to make them more productive. And some want to work 90 hours a week to have a big house, while others prefer a more laid-back yet frugal lifestyle. Communism is not making a comeback. Socialism in western societies simply defines a safety net, a lower bound of human existence, which is not intended to satisfy people. And at the upper end, practically nobody is arguing that the janitor and the CEO should be paid the same. Now, whether that pay ratio should be 10, or 100, or 1000, or even more, that people are questioning (especially in recent cases where Wall Street is reaping huge rewards for destructive actions). The accrual of wealth by inheritance rather than merit is something people question. Monopolization of natural resources is something people question. But nobody I've ever known wanted Coke and McDonald's to be nationalized in the hopes the government could do what they do better.
It would be wonderful if we could all live wild and free, our gluttony not constrained by physical realities. But the fact is, we are sharing this planet. As the number of people and their inter-connectedness continues to increase, the attitudes you describe are inevitable - the have-nots aren't just going to sit there and watch us carry on. They're not that stupid.
Not all of economics is zero-sum, but some is. If the acreage, oil, and water of the earth were equally divided among everybody on the planet, I guarantee you wouldn't have people like Ted Turner owning "two million acres (8,000 km), greater than the land areas of Delaware and Rhode Island combined."
I'm not even sure my modest 1/2 acre in a suburb could be had by each (globally), when you consider that much of the world's acreage is inhospitable climates. I suppose most of the acreage "used" by my family is not what we live on, but the farmland, ranch-land, forests, mines, aquifer, etc. devoted to supplying resources for our consumption.
That said, a lot of people seem to like living densely populated, at least when the economic advantages are factored in.
Heh, not sure if you were being sarcastic or not. But although I support nuclear power, maintaining long-term credibility and safety does require regulation, and action to follow through when the regulations are not met. Nothing could discredit the nuclear industry more than letting things slide. (The fact nobody thinks to make any long-term changes every time another couple dozen coal miners are buried alive is a separate issue...)
I wonder? Obviously they will predominate the installed base for a long time, since poor people don't waste working stuff like we do. But looking across the room with a 10 year old 27" Trinitron CRT at one and and a 46" Bravia LCD at the other, it's not at all obvious that the older one would be cheaper to produce. I'm sure the CRT factories are all paid off, but look at raw materials and shipping costs. The CRT has this huge vacuum tube made of glass with a high lead content. Last holiday season I got a 21" 1080p computer monitor for under $100; I don't remember ever paying so little for a CRT that size even when they were decades-old technology.
I can see why manufacturers are terrified when the new thing is not only better, but also cheaper than the old. But ultimately that's the basis of most economic growth.
If the universe were deterministic, then time is essentially meaningless even if it exists, since the start state and dynamics are all you need to know. And if the dynamics are information-preserving, any state (not just the start state) suffices. Apparently there are even deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics, although I really don't know what that means.
But the chicken produces fewer eggs than you feed it. Not just "not more", but "fewer."
The strongest deja vu I ever had was right after hitting my head in a sledding accident.
Microsoft has tried and not managed to equal google. It's not so easy.
Do the newer 120 and 240 hz LCD TVs actually accept a 240 hz signal? My impression is they are just upsampling from the 60 hz signal. Can you set the refresh rate on your computer to 240 hz for them?
Or are those now considered too advanced for the "Mom" application?
The same problem, and the same strength.
Centralized has some advantages over decentralized, and some disadvantages. If linux were just RedHat, it could never have become Ubuntu. On the other hand, it's frustrating when even copy/paste doesn't always work :)
Ultimately, in old age each generation must be cared for by the next. The rest is just accounting. Whether your entitlement is in the form of a government-backed currency that you trust will be redeemable for goods and services when you need them, or whether the entitlement is in the form of a promise that the next generation will be taxed to support you, it doesn't make all that much difference. In other words, the difficulties of Social Security are directly due to a decline in the number of workers for each retiree, so the same problem would manifest even if we were all preparing for retirement by buying stocks instead of paying into SS.
And as for giving people an equal share of political influence, just last week the activist conservative Supreme Court just gave corporations the A-OK to spend as much as they like influencing elections.
However, are any of those government failures worse than their equivalent in the private sector?
1) Social Security: companies are dropping pension plans, and now, even suspending 401k's. Private investment (Wall Street) = a negative return over the last 10 years (unless you work at Goldman Sachs. Call me when govt. SS administrators are writing themselves checks for multi-million dollar bonuses).
2) Medicare: companies are reducing and dropping health plans or increasing rates, almost universally.
3) Fannie and Freddie: did no worse than any of the banks, i.e. terrible.
4) Dept of Education: not even sure what to compare to in the private market. Without public education the US would truly revert to the dark ages.
5) Stimulus: without govt backing the banking sector followed by the rest of the economy would have collapsed, period. The rest of the stimulus succeeds in proportion to how much is spent, but it's small relative to the whole economy, so the effect is small.
6) War on drugs: yes it's a fail, but it's also a very hard problem. Just legalizing pot wouldn't fix it all.
I'm saying we should learn from the mistakes of others in the present and the past, instead of trying to out-do them.
I'm not arguing we're still doing that in Afghanistan. Then again, we're not in a position to benefit from doing so. If the US were being invaded and occupied by a vastly superior alien force, we would be in a different situation and would almost certainly use different tactics. People can rationalize anything, and Americans are not inherently different than anybody else. Look how many of us suddenly embraced torturing prisoners of war.
In WWII the US did intentionally slaughter a couple hundred thousand civilians in Dresden and Japan (nukes). Without even entering the issue of whether that was justified, it's just not true to say we always avoided targeting civilians.
Not just that, it's an actual quote of Patton.
Come to think of it, what was really lacking in all the group projects I ever did in school was that none was large enough it wasn't easier to just do myself, whereas real-world projects you simply can't. That changes everything.
A fair point. The mechanical engineering school where I did my bachelor's degree had a "capstone project" that was larger scale than any of my class projects in CS.
All that said, I don't think it's bad to learn theory in school, and pick up experience later, at work. Most school time should be spent learning things you won't just "pick up" later. And if you really want work experience during school, get a job.
Schools are aware of this and they do try, but IMHO it just can't be done for real in that setting.
Getting involved in an open source project over a significant period of time is a better way.
Then taking pictures of people's faces to identify them will never catch on.
I'm not. Arms are not legs. The fact that some large land animals (us & our near relatives) went from 4 to 2 casts doubt on the idea that 6 would be better than 4.
1) by improving sales, thus amortizing the upfront design / manufacturing costs over more units
2) aftermarket warranties are more likely to be bought only be people who have some reason to suspect they might "accidentally" need to use it - a high risk pool. You don't want to be in that pool if you're really just a normal user with no intent of abuse or fraud.
3) aftermarket warranties give the manufacturer little incentive to reduce the number of claims by increasing the quality of the product, because they don't bear the cost. Actions speak louder than words; if you want me to think you build quality, don't quote me a high MTBF, offer me a long warranty.