That's true, but it's still possible that the relative values to the company are being miscalculated. If you fired that sales guy, could some other sales guy paid half as much sell the product just as well? My guess is that often the answer is "yes".
Similar with management. Yes, you need good management, but if you were only offering half of what you currently offer for senior executives, how big would the difference in company performance going forward be? I think less than the senior executives would like you to believe.
And while it's true that it doesn't matter if your product sucks as long as you can sell it, there are plenty of industries where it at least helps sell it if your product isn't total crap, if your engineers have a reputation for quickly solving issues that arise, etc.
Re:Student loan debt not worth it
on
The Real Science Gap
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Oh, on the last one, it'd also be better if funding were somewhat more stable and involved less overhead. From what I can tell, something like half of a professor's time at a top research university these days is spent writing grants and otherwise trying to get funding. Yes, we need some way of prioritizing research money, and it's not always bad to ask people to justify their requests for money. But when half or so of our top researchers' time is being used chasing money, instead of doing scientific research, that balance isn't quite right.
Re:NASA shutting down manned exploration doesn't h
on
The Real Science Gap
·
· Score: 1
I think the chronology was more the other way--- the death of serious research outside universities started in the private sector, with the slow deaths of Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc. NASA at least held out a bit longer than the private sector in that regard.
Re:Student loan debt not worth it
on
The Real Science Gap
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
For grad school in the sciences, loan debt is uncommon--- students typically get paid stipends as research assistants or teaching assistants, which cover full tuition plus a modest salary (~$16k-30k or so, depending on field and institution). Of course, students often have undergrad loan debt, but I don't think grad school makes it worse at least.
I think the biggest problem is, as you point out, post-PhD. There are too many PhDs being produced relative to good research jobs, so typically one has to do several postdocs, might have to take a lecturer position somewhere, etc., in hopes of eventually, maybe when you're 40 or something, getting a tenure-track faculty position. Oh, and that's a tenure-track position, which is basically 6-7 years of probation (but at least you're getting paid well at that point).
Not entirely sure how to fix that. Making PhD studies themselves more attractive won't fix the problem, I don't think; if anything, it'll make it worse, by encouraging the production of even more PhDs who there aren't research jobs for. Somehow the post-grad-school part has to be fixed. There have to be more research positions, either in academia, in industry, or at government labs. Or, if we aren't going to open up more of the top-level (tenured-faculty-tier) types of positions, at least there have to be more attractive lower-level ones, something better than a post-doc. Maybe one where you still work in someone else's lab (i.e. you aren't the lab head), but you get paid better and have somewhat more research freedom. But that requires funding, too.
Yeah, my skepticism is largely because I'm in academia. I think I would've been more impressed by that list of credentials before I got into "the game". Now I want to see evidence, not CV lines.
Slashdot's role is to provide a mostly uninformed but passionate argument between a few straw-man positions based on little evidence, but Pinker & Carr beat us to it.
I'm not sure what part of the economy you're located in, but in the Bay-Area tech sector, it's hard enough to find tech employees that companies are still paying recruiting bonuses, and a few that had ditched them during the recession have reinstituted them.
The problem is that, as the saying goes, "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". There are very few things that force prices to return to underlying real valuations. Bankruptcy is one hard forcing function, so if you short a company that goes bankrupt on a relatively short timescale, you can definitely make money, because even the most irrational group of investors has no choice but to wake up and pay attention once the company is actually being liquidated. But short of bankruptcy, there's not much in the way of forcing function that would prevent a company from being overvalued for decades before the stock price corrects.
Much of the early history in that timeline are medieval-style craftsman guilds, which the grandparent poster acknowledged as one of the forerunners. New York tailors going on strike in 1768 was much more in keeping with those ages-old craft/professional guilds than modern trade unions, though. They had relatively few, relatively highly skilled and highly paid members--- a tailor in New York wasn't rich, but they weren't really "working class" in the way that a factory worker or coal miner was, which is what the modern union movement that emerged in the 19th century was based on.
That trade-union movement emerged post-industrial-revolution, in relatively dangerous industries with large masses of workers. Railroads were indeed one of the main centers, with coal mining emerging as the main source of conflict later in the 19th century (and early 20th).
Which other party had 53%? In the last elections before Hitler was appointed Chancellor, the Nazis got 33%, and the second-best showing (by the Social Democrats) was 20%. That's at least a reasonably strong plurality, which in most parliamentary systems would be enough to give the party that got 33% first crack at forming a government--- especially if, as in this election, there was no obvious coalition with more votes.
A particular problem was that the communists (KPD) weren't willing to join an anti-Nazi coalition of bourgeois parties. Of the groups vying to form a coalition government, the NSDAP-DNVP coalition had 41.6%. The pro-democracy "Weimar coalition" that had ruled for much of the 1920s (SDP, DDP, and Centre) got 33% between them. The non-Nazi right (if the DNVP had joined them instead of the Nazis) had about 12-13% between them, or about 25% if they got the Centre Party onboard too. To the extent that anybody could be said to have "won" the Nov. 1932 election, the NSDAP-DNVP coalition comes reasonably close.
The problem is that if it's too high volume, it both makes and is the market. If everyone's running a statistical model that says that Event X will cause a stock price increase, the stock price will increase, even if it wouldn't have otherwise.
I don't think it does much for market irrationality. It does provide liquidity, though, which is good in reasonable amounts: means that if you want to buy or sell a stock right now, you don't have to wait for another long-term investor who wants to make the opposite transaction, but can buy from or sell to one of these people who are always churning their holdings.
It can be a problem if this sort of statistical-trading volume swamps the "real" trading, though. Ideally an exchange is supposed to send price signals that reflect some sort of external supply and demand, but if, say, only 5% of the market participants are normal market participants, and 95% are trading with 20-minute horizons based on statistical models, you've got a weird feedback-loop market that reacts mostly to itself.
It used to be common to engage in pretty wide-ranging censorship of the media for fixed, relatively short periods, while a war was being conducted, such as during World War I. But to do that requires that wars actually end within a few years. If we institute similar censorship for the "War on Terror", when will we conclude that the war ended and censorship can be lifted? My guess is never.
He did win a strong plurality, though, which in parliamentary systems is usually enough to get you elected Prime Minister (if there's no majority, but one party clearly has a strong plurality, they usually end up forming the government).
There's no reason to shoot yourself in the foot, though. If you can stop or expose an injustice perpetrated by the government and also avoid getting yourself smooshed by the same government, no reason not to.
Some version of that is what some of the dome-with-pipes attempts were, but the pipe ended up being clogged up by slushy hydrate ice, among other problems.
I think he's saying that he can't use LVM snapshots, because some of his servers have ext3 directly on a plain partition, not on top of LVM (used to be a common setup).
The poster in question explicitly identified himself as an American, using the phrase, "we, the US". It has nothing to do with assuming all English speakers must be American. It is reasonable, I think, to assume that people who use the pronoun "we" to speak about the United States are Americans.
Is 20/10 vision actually common with correction? The conventional wisdom among ophthalmologists I know is to slightly undercorrect, to something like 20/25, because overcorrecting seems to just promote even faster degeneration (though the evidence on that is mixed).
The U.S. is generally a country with some notion of property rights, though, so the police cannot arbitrarily seize and keep things if no law was violated, even at borders. They can search luggage entering the country, sure, but this case was about whether the police may keep a laptop for six months or longer without any sort of forfeiture proceeding or at least some sort of showing that the laptop was contraband under U.S. law and properly subject to confiscation.
Indeed, that's one reason that even Adam Smith supported some limited kinds of government intervention as necessary for a free market to operate. In particular, he supported laws against attempts to inject misinformation into markets, like fraud and false advertising. In a particularly interesting example, he also supported a law that would require employers to pay their employees in cash, not in either: 1) IOUs; or 2) goods.
His argument on that latter one was that requiring employers to pay cash makes it more likely that a transparent market will develop, by not tying one transaction (the employment one) to another one in a way that could make it easy to slip in fraud and deceit. For example, an employer paying with a bunch of IOUs might not intend to honor them, so hopes to get a bunch of free labor they never plan to pay for. An employer paying with goods might misrepresent their value, and given the employer/employee relationship, the employee may be in a bad position to question that. Requiring the transactions to be split (pay the employee in cash, and then let them buy goods separately if they want) reduces that risk.
Clearly the free-market fundamentalists would hate restrictions like that, but folks more in the Adam-Smith tradition don't have any religious belief that markets automatically produce ideal solutions; rather, they think market mechanisms are generally efficient ways of allocating resources, and support government intervention mainly aimed at the limited goal of keeping markets transparent and competitive.
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That's true, but it's still possible that the relative values to the company are being miscalculated. If you fired that sales guy, could some other sales guy paid half as much sell the product just as well? My guess is that often the answer is "yes".
Similar with management. Yes, you need good management, but if you were only offering half of what you currently offer for senior executives, how big would the difference in company performance going forward be? I think less than the senior executives would like you to believe.
And while it's true that it doesn't matter if your product sucks as long as you can sell it, there are plenty of industries where it at least helps sell it if your product isn't total crap, if your engineers have a reputation for quickly solving issues that arise, etc.
Oh, on the last one, it'd also be better if funding were somewhat more stable and involved less overhead. From what I can tell, something like half of a professor's time at a top research university these days is spent writing grants and otherwise trying to get funding. Yes, we need some way of prioritizing research money, and it's not always bad to ask people to justify their requests for money. But when half or so of our top researchers' time is being used chasing money, instead of doing scientific research, that balance isn't quite right.
I think the chronology was more the other way--- the death of serious research outside universities started in the private sector, with the slow deaths of Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc. NASA at least held out a bit longer than the private sector in that regard.
For grad school in the sciences, loan debt is uncommon--- students typically get paid stipends as research assistants or teaching assistants, which cover full tuition plus a modest salary (~$16k-30k or so, depending on field and institution). Of course, students often have undergrad loan debt, but I don't think grad school makes it worse at least.
I think the biggest problem is, as you point out, post-PhD. There are too many PhDs being produced relative to good research jobs, so typically one has to do several postdocs, might have to take a lecturer position somewhere, etc., in hopes of eventually, maybe when you're 40 or something, getting a tenure-track faculty position. Oh, and that's a tenure-track position, which is basically 6-7 years of probation (but at least you're getting paid well at that point).
Not entirely sure how to fix that. Making PhD studies themselves more attractive won't fix the problem, I don't think; if anything, it'll make it worse, by encouraging the production of even more PhDs who there aren't research jobs for. Somehow the post-grad-school part has to be fixed. There have to be more research positions, either in academia, in industry, or at government labs. Or, if we aren't going to open up more of the top-level (tenured-faculty-tier) types of positions, at least there have to be more attractive lower-level ones, something better than a post-doc. Maybe one where you still work in someone else's lab (i.e. you aren't the lab head), but you get paid better and have somewhat more research freedom. But that requires funding, too.
Yeah, my skepticism is largely because I'm in academia. I think I would've been more impressed by that list of credentials before I got into "the game". Now I want to see evidence, not CV lines.
Slashdot's role is to provide a mostly uninformed but passionate argument between a few straw-man positions based on little evidence, but Pinker & Carr beat us to it.
I'm not sure what part of the economy you're located in, but in the Bay-Area tech sector, it's hard enough to find tech employees that companies are still paying recruiting bonuses, and a few that had ditched them during the recession have reinstituted them.
The problem is that, as the saying goes, "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". There are very few things that force prices to return to underlying real valuations. Bankruptcy is one hard forcing function, so if you short a company that goes bankrupt on a relatively short timescale, you can definitely make money, because even the most irrational group of investors has no choice but to wake up and pay attention once the company is actually being liquidated. But short of bankruptcy, there's not much in the way of forcing function that would prevent a company from being overvalued for decades before the stock price corrects.
In regards to a citation for real wages declining, here is some data.
Much of the early history in that timeline are medieval-style craftsman guilds, which the grandparent poster acknowledged as one of the forerunners. New York tailors going on strike in 1768 was much more in keeping with those ages-old craft/professional guilds than modern trade unions, though. They had relatively few, relatively highly skilled and highly paid members--- a tailor in New York wasn't rich, but they weren't really "working class" in the way that a factory worker or coal miner was, which is what the modern union movement that emerged in the 19th century was based on.
That trade-union movement emerged post-industrial-revolution, in relatively dangerous industries with large masses of workers. Railroads were indeed one of the main centers, with coal mining emerging as the main source of conflict later in the 19th century (and early 20th).
Which other party had 53%? In the last elections before Hitler was appointed Chancellor, the Nazis got 33%, and the second-best showing (by the Social Democrats) was 20%. That's at least a reasonably strong plurality, which in most parliamentary systems would be enough to give the party that got 33% first crack at forming a government--- especially if, as in this election, there was no obvious coalition with more votes.
A particular problem was that the communists (KPD) weren't willing to join an anti-Nazi coalition of bourgeois parties. Of the groups vying to form a coalition government, the NSDAP-DNVP coalition had 41.6%. The pro-democracy "Weimar coalition" that had ruled for much of the 1920s (SDP, DDP, and Centre) got 33% between them. The non-Nazi right (if the DNVP had joined them instead of the Nazis) had about 12-13% between them, or about 25% if they got the Centre Party onboard too. To the extent that anybody could be said to have "won" the Nov. 1932 election, the NSDAP-DNVP coalition comes reasonably close.
The problem is that if it's too high volume, it both makes and is the market. If everyone's running a statistical model that says that Event X will cause a stock price increase, the stock price will increase, even if it wouldn't have otherwise.
I don't think it does much for market irrationality. It does provide liquidity, though, which is good in reasonable amounts: means that if you want to buy or sell a stock right now, you don't have to wait for another long-term investor who wants to make the opposite transaction, but can buy from or sell to one of these people who are always churning their holdings.
It can be a problem if this sort of statistical-trading volume swamps the "real" trading, though. Ideally an exchange is supposed to send price signals that reflect some sort of external supply and demand, but if, say, only 5% of the market participants are normal market participants, and 95% are trading with 20-minute horizons based on statistical models, you've got a weird feedback-loop market that reacts mostly to itself.
It used to be common to engage in pretty wide-ranging censorship of the media for fixed, relatively short periods, while a war was being conducted, such as during World War I. But to do that requires that wars actually end within a few years. If we institute similar censorship for the "War on Terror", when will we conclude that the war ended and censorship can be lifted? My guess is never.
He did win a strong plurality, though, which in parliamentary systems is usually enough to get you elected Prime Minister (if there's no majority, but one party clearly has a strong plurality, they usually end up forming the government).
There's no reason to shoot yourself in the foot, though. If you can stop or expose an injustice perpetrated by the government and also avoid getting yourself smooshed by the same government, no reason not to.
Isn't proposing a reduction in government spending that would slow the economy actually primarily a thing conservatives are doing?
If you had $20b to spend, you could build quite a bit of pumped-storage hydro to go along with that wind.
Some version of that is what some of the dome-with-pipes attempts were, but the pipe ended up being clogged up by slushy hydrate ice, among other problems.
The cutoff seems to be somewhat higher, at around 13 times the mass of Jupiter.
I think he's saying that he can't use LVM snapshots, because some of his servers have ext3 directly on a plain partition, not on top of LVM (used to be a common setup).
The poster in question explicitly identified himself as an American, using the phrase, "we, the US". It has nothing to do with assuming all English speakers must be American. It is reasonable, I think, to assume that people who use the pronoun "we" to speak about the United States are Americans.
Is 20/10 vision actually common with correction? The conventional wisdom among ophthalmologists I know is to slightly undercorrect, to something like 20/25, because overcorrecting seems to just promote even faster degeneration (though the evidence on that is mixed).
The U.S. is generally a country with some notion of property rights, though, so the police cannot arbitrarily seize and keep things if no law was violated, even at borders. They can search luggage entering the country, sure, but this case was about whether the police may keep a laptop for six months or longer without any sort of forfeiture proceeding or at least some sort of showing that the laptop was contraband under U.S. law and properly subject to confiscation.
Indeed, that's one reason that even Adam Smith supported some limited kinds of government intervention as necessary for a free market to operate. In particular, he supported laws against attempts to inject misinformation into markets, like fraud and false advertising. In a particularly interesting example, he also supported a law that would require employers to pay their employees in cash, not in either: 1) IOUs; or 2) goods.
His argument on that latter one was that requiring employers to pay cash makes it more likely that a transparent market will develop, by not tying one transaction (the employment one) to another one in a way that could make it easy to slip in fraud and deceit. For example, an employer paying with a bunch of IOUs might not intend to honor them, so hopes to get a bunch of free labor they never plan to pay for. An employer paying with goods might misrepresent their value, and given the employer/employee relationship, the employee may be in a bad position to question that. Requiring the transactions to be split (pay the employee in cash, and then let them buy goods separately if they want) reduces that risk.
Clearly the free-market fundamentalists would hate restrictions like that, but folks more in the Adam-Smith tradition don't have any religious belief that markets automatically produce ideal solutions; rather, they think market mechanisms are generally efficient ways of allocating resources, and support government intervention mainly aimed at the limited goal of keeping markets transparent and competitive.