Just so you don't think I'm the AC, I was about to post exactly what he posted, except without the explitives, but adding Iran to his List of Wars Republicans Wanted. (McCain also wanted to side with Georgia against Russia during the 2008 campaign). Yeah, Bush's presidency wasn't so destructive if you simply ignore the wars he started and the terrorist attacks that occured on his watch. So what?
I don't entirely disagree with you, however several of the 911 hijackers, called the Hamburg Cell, did live in Germany prior the attack. This cell included 2 of the pilots, as well as ringleader Mohamed Atta.
As to this story, in the end there is no way to entirely eliminate geopolitics from globalization. But it is a matter of degree and I agree it has got out of hand in the wake of 911, although I am really only upset about the domestic side of it.
Do you really want to rest the entire argument against torture on some absolute assertion, such as it "never" works? Absolute claims are extrmely susceptible to being overturned. Even in the hypothetical situation that it has never worked before, but happens to in some unusual case next week, would that justify it in the future? I think not.
I'm a few years older than you, in CS (not EE), and have also more than doubled my initial salary (which, starting in the 90's was less than $50K after all), but it has leveled off for several years now.
In my opinion, being a great performer and even putting in extra hours goes only so far. More and more I have realized that technical accomplishment is actually invisible to management. I cannot over-emphasize that. They truly have no way of knowing how much you have accomplised (or not), within say, a factor of 3. This is not golf where you can make 50 times as much as the next guy by consistently being 5% better.
To be fair, I suspect all this subjectivity also allows us to continue with inflated estimates of our own worth as well. But there are pretty convincing studies showing that the difference in productivity between the most and least effective engineers is vast, whereas the differnece in pay is demonstrably far smaller.
The reason monopolies don't spring up everywhere is because nobody practices unfettered capitalism; it only works (or even continues to exist) when it is counter-balanced with democracy, which guarantees everybody an equal amount of power in one respect (the vote), which they are not allowed to sell. This is a safety valve to prevent the black hole of monopoly from collapsing all political and economic power to a sovereign (which was the normal state of human affairs until recently, say the French Revolution).
When America was founded markets were much more free than they are now. The reason this sort of worked was because natural resources were abundant whereas labor was scarce, which gave individuals more power. (I say "sort of" because even then, those on the bottom rung of the economy were bought and sold as property, with no possibilty of earning their way out). But almost as soon as the industrial revolution reached the US, monopolies took over vital industries including transportation (rail), energy (oil), and finance almost immediately (think Rockefeller and JP Morgan). The only reason they were broken up is because the American people decided collectively to abolish them through the political process.
Dire predictions (including Marx's) rarely come to pass because people are rarely dumb enough to continue on the same disastrous path to its final conclusion. (See also Malthusiasm). A sprinkling of socialism in the US (the New Deal) saved the US from failing, and ultimately reversed the more extreme tide - communism - that had been gathering some support around the world and even here in the US at the time. Because capitalism was counter-balanced with democracy our system was able to bend instead of breaking. I can tell you than Rockefeller did not vote for Teddy Roosevelt.
Define "drone." ICBMs aren't remote-controlled; they have used celestial navigation since the early 50's, similar to how ancient mariners navigated.
The reason we use so much human supervision now is from an abundance of caution, and because the conflicts are small enough that it is possible to do. If there were another world war, you would see within a few years far more automated swarming systems that in turn would overwhelm anything but a highly autonomous response.
That is assuming nobody loses their temper and tosses the game board across the room first (by launching their nukes).
Either that or the hardware was outdated and/or soon-to-be replaced anyways (like the CRT photo in the accompanying story), so they just went with the upgrade instead of spending money to verify old stuff.
Any IT upgrade could be spun exactly like this story, if you wanted... "why did you get a new mouse with that new system, the old one was working perfectly fine and now it's going in the trash!"
Most wielding of power doesn't occur in a court of law. And when it does, how much of the backstory actually comes to light?
Look at insider trading, what percent of occurrences do you think are actually discovered and successfully prosecuted? Proving where information came from - such as the idea to look at a few disparate sources and put them together in a certain way - can be accomplished only to a certain degree.
If you look at past corrupt officials that did a lot of damage with much less powerful tools at their disposal, such as J Edgar Hoover or Senator McCarthy or President Nixon, the admissibility of evidence in court really had very little to do with anything.
As for Congress, Clapper was caught in a bald-faced lie to them. After being caught, he said sorry, so apparently that's the end of that. For that matter, under Bush similar activities were carried out without any notification of Congress or the courts. They were caught eventually, and nothing happened. It's a real shame, because integrity is everything when you're dealing in secrecy and cannot directly verify the facts. All we know for sure, now, is that they're making up secret rules for themselves as they go along.
Proving who collected the evidence that started an investigation down a certain path is like proving that a job candidate was turned down for age discrimination. For example, a politically-interested insider could make an anonymous tip to a newspaper reporter about a candidate in an election. The reporter confirms the tip by interviewing somebody who they otherwise wouldn't have known to talk to, and so on... I think there is a general problem that a society with too many one-way mirrors becomes lopsided as it allows insiders to consolidate their power permanently.
Do they also know whether you're paying taxes on your mail order purchases and side-job income? (I mean, not that they would have gone to all the trouble of collecting the data just for that, but now that it's sitting right there...)
The power of an integrating capability isn't what it can glean from ONE source (gmail), but rather the cross product of combining MULTIPLE sources. (gmail, facebook, phone records, credit report, amazon purchases? banking transactions?...) This cross-cutting capability is really the only portion that is unique/specific to government. (Except there is also a vast and shadowy industry of buying and selling the same personal information on private markets which we also know very little about).
It was a terrible cost, maybe even too high. We can never know how history might have turned otherwise. But it is silly to talk about America being founded on the consent of the governed. Between women, native Americans, and slaves, the majority of adults were not even allowed to vote. The Revolutionary period was very much about unlimited freedom for some, at the cost of many others.
Detroit is just foreshadowing what will happen to many of our cities over the next 15-20 years as our economy continues to slide into the ocean of wealth inequity.
I think, and hope, that last sentence is an overreach. Just because things are going that way in a given place doesn't mean it will eventually happen everywhere. Maybe the pendulum will swing back the other way, although it is hard to see how this worldwide oversupply of labor might be exhausted. Or at least the slide may run out of steam, finding a new equilibrium that's not ideal, but not utter collapse either. Look at Britain, no longer King of the World, but not a hellhole by any means.
But "outrage" is something else - it is something that rises to the level of being a voting issue. Voters may not like the program, but they are not outraged, and our elected officials (especially the President) are not humiliated and discredited like they will be if there is a big terrorist attack like 9/11. So they are choosing the safest path... the "safest" from Benghazi-style retroactive finger-pointing, that is.
Anyways, I do find the reversal of values in the poll you linked to be fascinating, particularly that suddenly more Democrats than Republicans favor running somebody up the flag pole for leaking.
US people (in general) are NOT outraged at the NSA. I have seen no sign that they are. In instituting the program our elected officials made the judgment that most people would rather have a small, or hoped-for, increase in security rather than retain their privacy, and so far it appears they were right.
If I have a car and want to charge people to drive them around the city, why shouldn't I be allowed to?
Evidently there are no reasons at all, since otherwise they surely would have forced their way into your head while you were typing out your rhetorical question.
Well, I am no expert but here is the page I was looking at:
Northern Nevada: Where Does Your Power Come From?
NV Energy has enough company-owned power plants to serve nearly all the needs of northern Nevada most of the time. The companyâ(TM)s three generating stations have the capacity to produce over 1,500 megawatts of electricity. (One megawatt is equivalent to the power required to serve about 600 households.)
The peak demand for power by the companyâ(TM)s 323,000 customers in 2011 was 1,513 megawatts.
In order to hold down costs, NV Energy relies on a combination of power generated at company-owned plants and electricity purchased from other utilities and independent power producers, including several geothermal plants located in Nevada.
In 2011, the company generated 50.5 percent of the electricity for the company's customers in northern Nevada and purchased 49.5 percent. Much of the purchased power consisted of lower-cost hydroelectric power from the Pacific Northwest.
Actually I did google it before posting, and it said Reno gets about half its power from local generation; the other half is bought from cheap hydro sources in the pacific northwest. But the point was there is at least one spot with lots of sunshine, empty land, a huge and under-filled reservoir, and big electricity requirements, so there is no point worrying about storage capacity for solar, for several different reasons really.
Slashdot Mirror
Just so you don't think I'm the AC, I was about to post exactly what he posted, except without the explitives, but adding Iran to his List of Wars Republicans Wanted. (McCain also wanted to side with Georgia against Russia during the 2008 campaign). Yeah, Bush's presidency wasn't so destructive if you simply ignore the wars he started and the terrorist attacks that occured on his watch. So what?
Body count from wars. Total or just Americans, take your pick.
Or did it? Compare Bush vs. Obama on raw body count, and it is nowhwere close. Like, a factor of 100.
As to this story, in the end there is no way to entirely eliminate geopolitics from globalization. But it is a matter of degree and I agree it has got out of hand in the wake of 911, although I am really only upset about the domestic side of it.
Do you really want to rest the entire argument against torture on some absolute assertion, such as it "never" works? Absolute claims are extrmely susceptible to being overturned. Even in the hypothetical situation that it has never worked before, but happens to in some unusual case next week, would that justify it in the future? I think not.
In my opinion, being a great performer and even putting in extra hours goes only so far. More and more I have realized that technical accomplishment is actually invisible to management. I cannot over-emphasize that. They truly have no way of knowing how much you have accomplised (or not), within say, a factor of 3. This is not golf where you can make 50 times as much as the next guy by consistently being 5% better.
To be fair, I suspect all this subjectivity also allows us to continue with inflated estimates of our own worth as well. But there are pretty convincing studies showing that the difference in productivity between the most and least effective engineers is vast, whereas the differnece in pay is demonstrably far smaller.
When America was founded markets were much more free than they are now. The reason this sort of worked was because natural resources were abundant whereas labor was scarce, which gave individuals more power. (I say "sort of" because even then, those on the bottom rung of the economy were bought and sold as property, with no possibilty of earning their way out). But almost as soon as the industrial revolution reached the US, monopolies took over vital industries including transportation (rail), energy (oil), and finance almost immediately (think Rockefeller and JP Morgan). The only reason they were broken up is because the American people decided collectively to abolish them through the political process.
Dire predictions (including Marx's) rarely come to pass because people are rarely dumb enough to continue on the same disastrous path to its final conclusion. (See also Malthusiasm). A sprinkling of socialism in the US (the New Deal) saved the US from failing, and ultimately reversed the more extreme tide - communism - that had been gathering some support around the world and even here in the US at the time. Because capitalism was counter-balanced with democracy our system was able to bend instead of breaking. I can tell you than Rockefeller did not vote for Teddy Roosevelt.
Define "drone." ICBMs aren't remote-controlled; they have used celestial navigation since the early 50's, similar to how ancient mariners navigated.
The reason we use so much human supervision now is from an abundance of caution, and because the conflicts are small enough that it is possible to do. If there were another world war, you would see within a few years far more automated swarming systems that in turn would overwhelm anything but a highly autonomous response.
That is assuming nobody loses their temper and tosses the game board across the room first (by launching their nukes).
That will go away real quick if and when the next real air war comes along, such that friendly fire isn't the main threat.
Any IT upgrade could be spun exactly like this story, if you wanted... "why did you get a new mouse with that new system, the old one was working perfectly fine and now it's going in the trash!"
Look at insider trading, what percent of occurrences do you think are actually discovered and successfully prosecuted? Proving where information came from - such as the idea to look at a few disparate sources and put them together in a certain way - can be accomplished only to a certain degree.
If you look at past corrupt officials that did a lot of damage with much less powerful tools at their disposal, such as J Edgar Hoover or Senator McCarthy or President Nixon, the admissibility of evidence in court really had very little to do with anything.
As for Congress, Clapper was caught in a bald-faced lie to them. After being caught, he said sorry, so apparently that's the end of that. For that matter, under Bush similar activities were carried out without any notification of Congress or the courts. They were caught eventually, and nothing happened. It's a real shame, because integrity is everything when you're dealing in secrecy and cannot directly verify the facts. All we know for sure, now, is that they're making up secret rules for themselves as they go along.
Proving who collected the evidence that started an investigation down a certain path is like proving that a job candidate was turned down for age discrimination. For example, a politically-interested insider could make an anonymous tip to a newspaper reporter about a candidate in an election. The reporter confirms the tip by interviewing somebody who they otherwise wouldn't have known to talk to, and so on... I think there is a general problem that a society with too many one-way mirrors becomes lopsided as it allows insiders to consolidate their power permanently.
Do they also know whether you're paying taxes on your mail order purchases and side-job income? (I mean, not that they would have gone to all the trouble of collecting the data just for that, but now that it's sitting right there...)
The power of an integrating capability isn't what it can glean from ONE source (gmail), but rather the cross product of combining MULTIPLE sources. (gmail, facebook, phone records, credit report, amazon purchases? banking transactions?...) This cross-cutting capability is really the only portion that is unique/specific to government. (Except there is also a vast and shadowy industry of buying and selling the same personal information on private markets which we also know very little about).
It was a terrible cost, maybe even too high. We can never know how history might have turned otherwise. But it is silly to talk about America being founded on the consent of the governed. Between women, native Americans, and slaves, the majority of adults were not even allowed to vote. The Revolutionary period was very much about unlimited freedom for some, at the cost of many others.
Now look at how the death rate has changed over time - it dropped dramatically by 1990, and remained at that lower number even as the number of ascents soared. So talking about the death rate going back to the 1950s is quite misleading.
I think, and hope, that last sentence is an overreach. Just because things are going that way in a given place doesn't mean it will eventually happen everywhere. Maybe the pendulum will swing back the other way, although it is hard to see how this worldwide oversupply of labor might be exhausted. Or at least the slide may run out of steam, finding a new equilibrium that's not ideal, but not utter collapse either. Look at Britain, no longer King of the World, but not a hellhole by any means.
Anyways, I do find the reversal of values in the poll you linked to be fascinating, particularly that suddenly more Democrats than Republicans favor running somebody up the flag pole for leaking.
US people (in general) are NOT outraged at the NSA. I have seen no sign that they are. In instituting the program our elected officials made the judgment that most people would rather have a small, or hoped-for, increase in security rather than retain their privacy, and so far it appears they were right.
Evidently there are no reasons at all, since otherwise they surely would have forced their way into your head while you were typing out your rhetorical question.
You are confused.
30" 2560x1600 LCD displays were released in 2004.
2013: 2560x1080
Actually I did google it before posting, and it said Reno gets about half its power from local generation; the other half is bought from cheap hydro sources in the pacific northwest. But the point was there is at least one spot with lots of sunshine, empty land, a huge and under-filled reservoir, and big electricity requirements, so there is no point worrying about storage capacity for solar, for several different reasons really.
Then again with all the AC needed just to survive in NV it is hard to imagine solar ever outstripping peak daytime demand.