Don't think I'm missing your point, because I'm not. I agree with everything you said, I'm just going to go off on a tangent based on your mention of Sears...
Sears has internal problems, certainly - but in large part it is doomed no matter how well run due to past strategic decisions. Back when their main business was mail order, they insisted on publishing their huge tome and sending it to every home in the USA at considerable expense. Meanwhile, specialty catalogs like LL Bean were eating their lunch. Sears had the largest database about the buying habits of US consumers in existence, and yet instead of using that to their advantage to send out more frequent, seasonal, targeted specialty catalogs they stubbornly plowed ahead with the massive yearly tome. In addition, they built a huge, expensive retail presence in the emerging mall phenomenon, a trend which has since evaporated. This has left them with little mail-order (now internet) presence and a bunch of noncompetitive white elephants at now-empty malls. The entire corporation could function as single, well-oiled machine and it would still fail at this point.
Next task - try not to get arrested sneaking around the day care center with a telephoto lens...
(My dad says I need to rig up a little skid on a mono-filament so I can make the cardboard cutouts dart out in front of the speeding cars. Too bad I have a day job.)
They wouldn't dare - I know where their babies are. Most of them are speeding to a local daycare center to pick up their little snowflakes before the 6 o'clock deadline. Another idea I had was to take pictures of the speeders' kids and make big cardboard cutouts of their kids to place in the middle of the street.
Ah, the great state of PA, where the state owns many of the local roads so the township can't improve them. Where the cops can't use radar. Where 80% of the traffic ticket proceeds go to the state...
I've wondered about the legality of putting a license plate reader on a camera on my house and Facebook shaming people. Probably a bad idea.
Fortunately, it is not only frequently-stolen but the thief happens to be a kleptomaniac nun, and the convent is all too happy to return any stolen goods.
I can think of better ways to "showcase" my divorce paperwork. YouTube can be used for private videos, too, but the public default does not seem to rankle. It seems like this site was trying to be the "YouTube of documents". It wouldn't surprise me if that's how it got pitched. Anyway, I hope you take a stop over to docs.com and see how grossly unsuited it is to tasks requiring security or discretion. I think this may rank up there with "do not insert into any orifice" labels on curling irons.
Maybe, but the site does declare "Showcase and discover Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Sway, Minecraft world and PDF documents for free" in like 40-point font at the top of the home page. Why are people using this if they don't want to "showcase"?
Because sometimes it's just sort of "fuck it". You can stress over every move you make online, or you can take reasonable precautions and risk recovering from something like identity theft later on. One of those reasonable precautions should probably be using something reputable and purpose-built like Dropbox or Drive rather than something that proclaims on the front page "Showcase and discover Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Sway, Minecraft world and PDF documents for free". Don't use a showcase site for your private files...
Along the lines of "fuck it", I regularly put my tax documents in Dropbox during tax season. It's reasonably safe, I think, compared to putting them in my pocket in an easily-lost USB stick or on a frequently-stolen laptop. It's not like the physical world is completely safe, either, and Dropbox and Google are going to be better at IT than I am.
On the surface I agree with you. In practice, I've gone the other direction and have become more pro-open-source over the years.
One example is MATLAB. I like MATLAB, and consider myself fairly good at it. People come to me to ask MATLAB questions. With that said, my company has floating licenses and these are a pain. Mathworks is very responsive in their customer service, but when you find a bug, you have to work around it or wait until they fix it. On the odd occasion where you want to actually distribute a script, you need to (maybe?) have the end-user download and install the (free as in beer) runtime separately.
I've switched the vast majority of my data analysis and other scripts to Python, and I no longer have to search for co-workers who left their copy of MATLAB open. When I find a bug, I can actually fix it myself and even return the fix to the module's project, along with any other feature that I find to be missing. When I need to distribute a script, I just make sure that I'm not using some forbidden-fruit GPL module (the ecosystem is mostly BSD) and zip the whole shebang up with one of the py-to-exe tools without consulting the frigging lawyer.
It's not all-rosy, for sure. Scientific/technical computing on Python has a higher learning curve than MATLAB. While vast help exists for Python trouble, MATLAB has all of the help concentrated in one place which makes finding solutions easier. One unexpected benefit to Python is the GUI. At first blush, MATLAB holds the high ground with its GUIDE visual GUI builder. But for anything more than a few simple controls, GUIDE is an unholy beast to work with. I've found my life much better with Python and it's wide choice of GUI frameworks. Even setting up the whole GUI with a text editor in Tkinter is worth the up-front time investment vs. the misleading initial ease of using GUIDE.
On the topic of SAS, one product that I do use of theirs is JMP. I have to admit it is faster (for me) for quick-and-dirty data analysis than using Python. I think I'd like to code up a Python application to do some of my most common JMP workflows... not try to reimplement the whole thing.
I just select the tabs that I want to close in gang (either with shift or ctrl/cmd) and then close them either with ctrl/cmd-w or a right click. For me it would be very rare that I want to close all but a single tab.
But I admit that I'm weird. I still can't completely let go of Firefox because of Tree Style Tabs. Tabs on the top is madness!:)
We set up institutions up like this all the time when the goal is a level of detachment from popular politics or cooperation across jurisdictions. In local government, they are usually set up as "authorities", such as the entities which administer the bridges between states (e.g. Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Delaware River Port Authority, etc.).
More broadly, every single corporation in the US gets its charter from a government. What we think of as "private" are actually entities that exist only at the whim of government.
At the end of the day, congress could dissolve the Fed with a single law, and that's what is important.
I'm not ignorant to anything you just said. "Long term" is one year. Whoopdiedoo. I can't imagine why you think a big tax on capital gains wouldn't serve as an incentive to leave your money in the tax-free corporate entity (i.e. long-term investment).
Where I grew up (2 hours from Philadelphia), we got one station clearly and a few more weakly if you had a good aerial. Cable brought us all of the Philly stations plus a few unaffiliated "super stations".
I have the same worry with my kids, who don't even know how to control the FIOS part of the TV. But I also find the irony of wondering if television commercials are good for kids quite amusing.
That is often true of first-generation immigrant communities, but it does not explain most US urban centers, where the instant someone becomes middle class they get the hell out of the ghetto.
So far there are no good alternatives to make something else happen as you put it.
Singapore does a pretty nice job of it. The government "owns" something like 85% of the housing - but they offer 90-year leases. So the government has fine-grained control over pricing and distribution of rent, but since the people buy and sell leases just like property the human psychological mechanisms at play with property ownership and investment kick in. At first, you might balk at the idea of government-as-landlord... but in most of the West we have property taxes which amounts to pretty much the same thing.
Other cities have different methods - in NYC they famously require certain percentages of new developments to be low-income housing.
The point is that you need to keep the pot stirred and limit the ability of moneyed people to flee, rather than solve, problems.
Policies which concentrate your poor in the inner city (much of the US) or in the suburbs (much of Europe) seem so obviously foolish, and yet we all seem to do it.
The problem in the US is we already have two giant government systems: Medicaid/Medicare ($1.1 trillion) and the VA (military - $182 billion). Medicaid/Medicare is single payer and VA is single-provider. Both systems are horrible in their own special way, and there is a huge credibility gap whenever someone advocates that the US government should provide healthcare. The last two presidents have the top two spots in the record books for Medicare/Medicaid expansion, and it still sucks.
I suppose if you needed to make an argument for this sort of thing, imagine a cargo container sent to the field that could 3d print weapons as needed rather than waiting for supplies to ship from a far-away depot. You just keep raw materials common to all weapons flowing to the battle front instead of worrying about x number of guns and x number of launchers. Even if the stuff isn't as good or as cheap as traditionally-manufactured weapons, at least it's there when you need it.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't think I'm missing your point, because I'm not. I agree with everything you said, I'm just going to go off on a tangent based on your mention of Sears...
Sears has internal problems, certainly - but in large part it is doomed no matter how well run due to past strategic decisions. Back when their main business was mail order, they insisted on publishing their huge tome and sending it to every home in the USA at considerable expense. Meanwhile, specialty catalogs like LL Bean were eating their lunch. Sears had the largest database about the buying habits of US consumers in existence, and yet instead of using that to their advantage to send out more frequent, seasonal, targeted specialty catalogs they stubbornly plowed ahead with the massive yearly tome. In addition, they built a huge, expensive retail presence in the emerging mall phenomenon, a trend which has since evaporated. This has left them with little mail-order (now internet) presence and a bunch of noncompetitive white elephants at now-empty malls. The entire corporation could function as single, well-oiled machine and it would still fail at this point.
Next task - try not to get arrested sneaking around the day care center with a telephoto lens...
(My dad says I need to rig up a little skid on a mono-filament so I can make the cardboard cutouts dart out in front of the speeding cars. Too bad I have a day job.)
They wouldn't dare - I know where their babies are. Most of them are speeding to a local daycare center to pick up their little snowflakes before the 6 o'clock deadline. Another idea I had was to take pictures of the speeders' kids and make big cardboard cutouts of their kids to place in the middle of the street.
Ah, the great state of PA, where the state owns many of the local roads so the township can't improve them. Where the cops can't use radar. Where 80% of the traffic ticket proceeds go to the state...
I've wondered about the legality of putting a license plate reader on a camera on my house and Facebook shaming people. Probably a bad idea.
Fortunately, it is not only frequently-stolen but the thief happens to be a kleptomaniac nun, and the convent is all too happy to return any stolen goods.
(Only part of the above is made up.)
Yeah, client information is a whole different ball of wax. Hopefully you never get to "fuck it", and instead have a more deliberate process :)
I can think of better ways to "showcase" my divorce paperwork. YouTube can be used for private videos, too, but the public default does not seem to rankle. It seems like this site was trying to be the "YouTube of documents". It wouldn't surprise me if that's how it got pitched. Anyway, I hope you take a stop over to docs.com and see how grossly unsuited it is to tasks requiring security or discretion. I think this may rank up there with "do not insert into any orifice" labels on curling irons.
Maybe, but the site does declare "Showcase and discover Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Sway, Minecraft world and PDF documents for free" in like 40-point font at the top of the home page. Why are people using this if they don't want to "showcase"?
Because sometimes it's just sort of "fuck it". You can stress over every move you make online, or you can take reasonable precautions and risk recovering from something like identity theft later on. One of those reasonable precautions should probably be using something reputable and purpose-built like Dropbox or Drive rather than something that proclaims on the front page "Showcase and discover Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Sway, Minecraft world and PDF documents for free". Don't use a showcase site for your private files...
Along the lines of "fuck it", I regularly put my tax documents in Dropbox during tax season. It's reasonably safe, I think, compared to putting them in my pocket in an easily-lost USB stick or on a frequently-stolen laptop. It's not like the physical world is completely safe, either, and Dropbox and Google are going to be better at IT than I am.
On the surface I agree with you. In practice, I've gone the other direction and have become more pro-open-source over the years.
One example is MATLAB. I like MATLAB, and consider myself fairly good at it. People come to me to ask MATLAB questions. With that said, my company has floating licenses and these are a pain. Mathworks is very responsive in their customer service, but when you find a bug, you have to work around it or wait until they fix it. On the odd occasion where you want to actually distribute a script, you need to (maybe?) have the end-user download and install the (free as in beer) runtime separately.
I've switched the vast majority of my data analysis and other scripts to Python, and I no longer have to search for co-workers who left their copy of MATLAB open. When I find a bug, I can actually fix it myself and even return the fix to the module's project, along with any other feature that I find to be missing. When I need to distribute a script, I just make sure that I'm not using some forbidden-fruit GPL module (the ecosystem is mostly BSD) and zip the whole shebang up with one of the py-to-exe tools without consulting the frigging lawyer.
It's not all-rosy, for sure. Scientific/technical computing on Python has a higher learning curve than MATLAB. While vast help exists for Python trouble, MATLAB has all of the help concentrated in one place which makes finding solutions easier. One unexpected benefit to Python is the GUI. At first blush, MATLAB holds the high ground with its GUIDE visual GUI builder. But for anything more than a few simple controls, GUIDE is an unholy beast to work with. I've found my life much better with Python and it's wide choice of GUI frameworks. Even setting up the whole GUI with a text editor in Tkinter is worth the up-front time investment vs. the misleading initial ease of using GUIDE.
On the topic of SAS, one product that I do use of theirs is JMP. I have to admit it is faster (for me) for quick-and-dirty data analysis than using Python. I think I'd like to code up a Python application to do some of my most common JMP workflows... not try to reimplement the whole thing.
I just select the tabs that I want to close in gang (either with shift or ctrl/cmd) and then close them either with ctrl/cmd-w or a right click. For me it would be very rare that I want to close all but a single tab.
But I admit that I'm weird. I still can't completely let go of Firefox because of Tree Style Tabs. Tabs on the top is madness! :)
We set up institutions up like this all the time when the goal is a level of detachment from popular politics or cooperation across jurisdictions. In local government, they are usually set up as "authorities", such as the entities which administer the bridges between states (e.g. Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Delaware River Port Authority, etc.).
More broadly, every single corporation in the US gets its charter from a government. What we think of as "private" are actually entities that exist only at the whim of government.
At the end of the day, congress could dissolve the Fed with a single law, and that's what is important.
Not only that, all profits go directly to the US Treasury.
I'm not ignorant to anything you just said. "Long term" is one year. Whoopdiedoo. I can't imagine why you think a big tax on capital gains wouldn't serve as an incentive to leave your money in the tax-free corporate entity (i.e. long-term investment).
I would love that. Couple it with counting capital gains and dividends as income.
Exactly what I'm talking about...
You don't leave it on all the time - you bring it out for parties. The drunker your friends are, the more fun.
Where I grew up (2 hours from Philadelphia), we got one station clearly and a few more weakly if you had a good aerial. Cable brought us all of the Philly stations plus a few unaffiliated "super stations".
I must be older than you. Cable started out as a simple rebroadcast over wire system, and the pay TV channels came later.
I have the same worry with my kids, who don't even know how to control the FIOS part of the TV. But I also find the irony of wondering if television commercials are good for kids quite amusing.
That is often true of first-generation immigrant communities, but it does not explain most US urban centers, where the instant someone becomes middle class they get the hell out of the ghetto.
So far there are no good alternatives to make something else happen as you put it.
Singapore does a pretty nice job of it. The government "owns" something like 85% of the housing - but they offer 90-year leases. So the government has fine-grained control over pricing and distribution of rent, but since the people buy and sell leases just like property the human psychological mechanisms at play with property ownership and investment kick in. At first, you might balk at the idea of government-as-landlord... but in most of the West we have property taxes which amounts to pretty much the same thing.
Other cities have different methods - in NYC they famously require certain percentages of new developments to be low-income housing.
The point is that you need to keep the pot stirred and limit the ability of moneyed people to flee, rather than solve, problems.
Policies which concentrate your poor in the inner city (much of the US) or in the suburbs (much of Europe) seem so obviously foolish, and yet we all seem to do it.
The problem in the US is we already have two giant government systems: Medicaid/Medicare ($1.1 trillion) and the VA (military - $182 billion). Medicaid/Medicare is single payer and VA is single-provider. Both systems are horrible in their own special way, and there is a huge credibility gap whenever someone advocates that the US government should provide healthcare. The last two presidents have the top two spots in the record books for Medicare/Medicaid expansion, and it still sucks.
To get funding for the research.
I suppose if you needed to make an argument for this sort of thing, imagine a cargo container sent to the field that could 3d print weapons as needed rather than waiting for supplies to ship from a far-away depot. You just keep raw materials common to all weapons flowing to the battle front instead of worrying about x number of guns and x number of launchers. Even if the stuff isn't as good or as cheap as traditionally-manufactured weapons, at least it's there when you need it.