I mean, why not just take the entire top-level domain down if there is an infringing page somewhere? Since we are going for the disproportional response, we might as well take it all the way...
Not quite the whole way.
Take down the Internet.
We all know it's just about piracy and free porn, anyhow.
... they did an analysis of yada yada and decided there was no such thing as seasonal affective disorder. googled it... https://www.scientificamerican...
With headline: "Study Finds "Seasonal Affective Disorder" Doesn't Exist"
Science is about getting closer to the truth by replacing less-accurate, inaccurate, and just plain wrong ideas with ones that are more accurate.
ANY study is subject to being found to be wrong or not-so-hot and its conclusions replaced by better ones.
Even if all the studies were performed perfectly and their data showed very strong support of the conclusions, some fraction would be wrong just because of data "noise".
There is NO "settled science". Just conclusions and models that have held up REALLY well - so far.
- "nG" was originally just an arbitrary marketing term, approximating "Our company's Nth generation of equipment, better than our (n-1)G service".
- As of 5G there IS a regulatory mandate from the ITU, but it's just for a set of minimal performance metrics, not a particular way to achieve them.
- So "5G" is not a STANDARD, but applies to a NUMBER of standards by which the which a carrier may chose to meet the required performance level. In particular;
--it does NOT guarantee interoperability with another carrier's "5G" branded offering
--If a carrier can achieve the required performance by appropriately configuring their 4G equipment (such as LTE and/or WiMax boxen) and the number of subscribers served by them, they are free to call it "5G".
1) A long ass wallpaper of job requirements that even after 20+ years in the industry with job references from multiple CEOs from successful companies and more current (and maintained honestly) certifications than most engineers, I don't meet half the requirements needed.
The first type, I know I can apply to it and get it usually because I understand the way job requirements are written. [after some research] I'll call a friend of a friend of a friend and get their boss to call me instead which will place me on better terms to list and negotiate my requirements.
That kind of job posting is what you see when they already have the candidate they want, but are required to post it and give others an "equal" chance at it. They don't want to switch. So they post a set of requirements that exactly matches the qualifications of the candidate they have in mind - all of them, not just the ones needed for the job. Few, if any, others will have every single oddball bit of experience the one they have in mind, so nobody comes by to rock the boat.
Sometimes it's impossible - because the actual candidate didn't have the qualifications, either, but had a fake resume. (That often happens with agencies bringing in H1-Bs. They do this so no real candidates can displace their warm body. My wife once hired one who supposedly had a masters in Comp Sci. The candidate didn't know about this, and risked her visa to point it out. My wife hired her because she DID have enough on the ball to do the job and was honest enough to tell truth to power even when it might be detrimental.)
If you do get through, and do convince them that you're a better pick, they'll have to post it again before they sign you up. So they'll make up another one exactly tuned to your history.
Yeah, how dare they be concerned for their workers safety when they have to go out and fix something and your house is still feeding power back into what they are working on.
That's not an issue if your inverter isn't grid-tied.
T-Mobile says: "We have coverage here, here, here..." Little rural company says: "They lied! They don't have coverage there, there, there,..."
Should be trivial to check, without even any fancy equipment. Take a T-Mobile 4G phone to there, there, there,... and make a call. "Can you hear me now?"
Now that both sides are on record, whichever is lying can be fined big time - which will more than pay for the FCC guy making the trip and tests.
Caveats:
- The next page of the thread, dealing with bypassing two-factor authentication, is two "next"s forward.
- Poisoned Minds / S.S.D.D. is generally N.S.F.W. (Including the next few pages after the one linked.)
Out of carbon? Yes we can. A company has, for several years, been making them of carbon nanotubes and non-rare, not-particularly-toxic, not-silicon, nanodiode arrays.
Good point. Can someone smart please say how many Costcos this would be? Or football fields?
Costcos aren't all the same size. (Football fields would work, if you're neglecting the stands and the space between the field proper and the audience..)
... embedded wires to serve as the "windings" of a two-dimensional [linear] stepper motor.
Note that "stepper" motors don't HAVE to move in increments of the pole spacing (though many have pole pieces shaped to encourage this.) If the pole pieces are properly shaped, they can also be operated as a polyphase analog motor and driven to positions arbitrarily dividing the cycle. Then the electronics can provide "steps" substantially finer than the pole spacing (or even "pure analog" positioning). At displacements smaller than the winding spacing you get progressively less accurate, but you can still manage pretty good location control.
Also: Even with big steps you can draw a really accurate line (straight or curved) by taking advantage of the mass of the drawing system and the timing of the steps.
The scale of the manufacturing is indeed awesome,...
Tell me about it.
One thing I heard about at the time (so I don't know for SURE if it was true, having just rumor, not personal experience or documentation) was the incremental plotter capable of making full-sized engineering drawings - of the entire plane. (Wow!)
Allegedly this consisted of a "plotter bed" the size of a hanger floor, with embedded wires to serve as the "windings" of a two-dimensional stepper motor. (I think the paper was held down by a vaccuum.) Add a "puck" with a pen, a vertical actuator, and a ground-effect vents, with the pen-lift controled and air supplied by a cable from the hanger roof (I imagine a hanger-sized coil-cord), and you would soon be able to see "the big picture". B-)
Or if you had smaller stuff to draw but needed multiple copies, just put several pucks on at the same time. They'd move in unison.
A few years ago there was a survey asking people where they got their news. The number one TV show people reported getting news from was The Daily Show, a comedy show.
So "news" these days, to most people, means Facebook or a comedian.
Given how much the mainstream media was caught faking the news, many perceive it as comedy already. So they probably decided they might as well watch a professional comedian do a more entertaining job of delivering honestly faked-as-convenient-for-him "infotainment-like art product".
At least he's more funny than the gloom-and-doom "news presenters".
Television news has been bunk since (at least) before the advent of Turner's original CNN. The network execs got the idea that people were watching news for entertainment rather than accurate information, and decided providing the former was cheaper. When all three (at the time) networks were doing it, there was nowhere for those who wanted TV news to turn, creating the market opportunity for Turner, and the new satellite/cable combination gave him the tech to seize it. (Unfortunately he sold out, first figuratively, then literally.)
Newspapers were ALWAYS one-sided and poorly researched bunk. (E.g.: "Yellow Journalism". Or all the way back to Franklin's health advice to avoid Jenner's vaccination.) Think: Did a newspaper EVER get it right for ANY story where you knew what was REALLY going on? Did they even spell the bride's name right?
Freedom of the Press works by letting ALL the biases have their own papers, giving every story, and all substantial sides of it, an opportunity to be heard. When newspapers consolidated down to one major outlet per city, that diversity was lost.
Now just about the only opportunity for news to flow freely is the Internet, and the main access point for those without an ongoing axe to grind is social media.
Sure it's a mix of facts, falsehoods, and fluff, and you have to do your own filtering. But the "professional news media" has pretty much ALWAYS been that. There were a few decades where broadcast was king, the cost kept the number of players down to those you could count on one hand, and they pretended to give accurate and unbiased coverage to everything of importance. But that illusion has been popped by general access to unedited Internet distribution.
Let's hope "The Invisible Hand" and "The Internet sees censorship as failure and routes around it" keeps that access open, as the major social media providers impose their own censorship.
Under Burdick, accepting a pardon is an admission of guilt. If a President were to pardon himself, he would be admitting guilt.
Not necessarily. That's only the default if the pardon doesn't speak to the issue. But it can, if he so chooses:
(Quoting Washington Post)
... some pardons expressly state that they are based on the pardoner's decision that the defendant was actually innocent; and some legal rules expressly contemplate that - consider, for instance, the federal statute that provides for compensation of the unjustly convicted, which allows a plaintiff to prevail by showing (among other things) "that he has been pardoned upon the stated ground of innocence and unjust conviction."
The Justice Department Standards for Consideration of Clemency Petitioners also expressly contemplate the possibility of "pardon on grounds of innocence or miscarriage of justice,"...
So all he has to do is pardon himself and state in the pardon that the pardon is NOT an admission of guilt. Then it isn't.
Which doesn't keep him from being impeached anyhow. But it does head off the claim that by pardoning himself he's already pleaded guilty.
Also thanks to Prop 13, if the value of your property goes down, your taxes (usually) still go up!
Had that happen: The value went 'way down for a bit at one point during the housing crash. The assessor dropped the assessment and the taxes tracked it down.
Our assessor was good that way. Don't know if the person was conscientious or trying to head off a LOT of work from appeals, but the result of either is the same so I'll assume the first.
The value bubbled up again nicely once the crash was over. I didn't check to see if the ramp had ratcheted taxes down to a lower starting point or if it jumped back to the old slow ramp-up when things recovered. (Still have all the records so may yet check that - though not in time for this thread.) Even if it jumped back up I was ahead of where I'd have been without the bubble-pop-bigger-bubble so I'm not complaining.
Note that, thanks to prop 60 and 90, people OVER 55 can, ONCE IN THEIR LIVES, transfer their tax limit benefit to another house in the same county, IF it is the SAME OR LOWER VALUE, and can do the same to another county IF the other county passes a law to allow it.
So older Calafornians might be able to move, once, to a nearby and cheaper house, and not get zinged. But they can forget about moving up in the world, or moving at all more than once. So they save it for if/when they really need it.
If you bought a house in 2014, and need to move, you'll be looking at housing that is 50% more expensive than it was then. That's a hard pill to swallow when CPI-adjusted wages have been going down over the same time.
Yes, and it's a good thing the home you are selling is also worth 50% more!
In California under proposition 13 (and other places with similar laws) you have an additional factor.
Prop 13 and the like were intended to keep rising housing prices from leading to rising taxes that end up evicting the old owners. So they freeze the assessed value (with a slight inflation creep) to keep the taxes from skyrocketing with a real estate bubble.
But sell the house and the new owner gets reassessed, and taxed, at the selling price or current market prices, and current tax rates. Then buy a house, even on the other side of the same town, and it happens to you, too.
Our house has more than tripled in price since we bought it about 20 years ago, and the mortgage will be paid off in less than another year. If we wanted to move to a different one like it, we'd more than triple our taxes - to about where our current mortgage + insurance + tax payments are. And if we sold, then had to come back to work in the same area, even our current payments for a four-room house on an oversized lot wouldn't rent a one-room apartment within commuting distance of the jobs.
So we stay where we are, until I either strike it seriously rich, I retire and we can move clear out of state, or (fat chance) the law is adjusted so I can carry the Prop 13 tax abatement with me to a new place and (if necessary) back.
Such an awesome idea! I first thought of it a few years ago, and I imagine others too,
I didn't originate it. (Maybe you did. B-) )
But (like "sealing the dry cell in a steel can to keep it from wrecking the flashlight when the caustic eats through the zinc electrode"), it's "Of COURSE!" once somebody thinks of it and tells others.
Moore's Law potentially has a long way to run - because semiconductors are still only a few layers thick in the Z axis and there are a lot more doublings left before we're dealing with "chips" that are solid circuitry feet on a side. Non vacuum "vacuum tubes" are far less sensitive to high temperatures than semiconductors, so building 3-D structures of them won't have as much of a cooling problem. (You still need to dissipate all the heat, but you can let the structure get 'way hotter to encourage it to migrate out.)
Single Threading speed may be falling off its free ride on Moore's Law-like exponential scaling, as speed-of-light and electron-size leakage limits raise a wall. (Going 3-D will help some, by shortening paths, but not by a lot.) But lots of really useful computations are massively parallelizable. The should drive continued manufacture and deployment of higher-switch-count devices as the technology is developed and yields are brought up.
Funny, those polls were predicting a Democratic wave election and wow they were right!
As "waves" go it was a "Blue Ripple", compared to typical first-term-midterms losses. But you missed a couple other points:
First: He GAINED several seats in the Senate, where it really mattered.
Second: The Rs were going to lose the house anyway. So the US electorate (with Trump's assistance in the form of non-campaining for the R-side swamp creatures), took the opportunity to do some swamp-draining in the House.
Notice it was primarily the RINOs and Never Trumpers (that hadn't already retired) who were the losers.
Sorry, but the USA is NOT the centre of the universe.
So what? The rest of the world is welcome to try to develop and sell its own high tech, just like we did.
Meanwhile, the USA is where *I* live and work now. So foreign-worker laws, their interpretation and enforcement, along with management and investor fads, all matter to *MY* bottom line. Especially when I have founding stock options in a startup but not enough clout with the C-suite to keep them from committing corporate suicide.
For non-founders, though, the H1B system, as currently practiced, is the hi-tek white-collar version of the blue-collars' "undocumented laborer" problem, where imported workers with shaky legal status that keeps them from demanding legally-mandated working conditions (and other issues) results in not just depressing the wages of the citizen-worker competion, but drives things SO low that, without government enforcement, employers have the choice of hiring illegals or becoming so uncompetitive that they go out of business.
The alternative is to set up software hubs in those other countries.
Then watch your cutting-edge company dull and rot, as the 10-minute turnaround time for Q-A turns into one day due to the near-half-day time offset.
(It's especially a scream to watch management try to use Agile techniques across a 12-hour offset and a giant culture gap, too.)
And that's assuming you find exceptionally competent help. (Hint: There ARE really competent engineers in, say, India. But they're pretty much all employed, and paid substantially more than the bulk of the body-shop fodder which are most of what you get now.)
One way to solve the time gap issue is to move the whole operation, including architecture, design, and admin, offshore. But then your IP is over there and NOT over here. If they're not competent you're left with restarting from scratch or an older snapshot when you realize they've blown it (and you're now months or years behind in the race to the window). If they ARE competent, watch for them to quit and start their own company (with your IP, under their IP laws and (non-)enforcement), leaving you in the same position but with a new competitor.
Even with engineers of ordinary competence and the project split across the pond, offshoring can be of negative value: Your designer spends a bunch of time breaking off a chunk to be done overseas, then ends up doing the work himself anyhow, when the module doesn't arrive in time. So the added worker cost both his own pay plus a bunch of the time of the local guy on the critical path without any benefit from his work product.
The invisible hand will get around to swatting the company - perhaps into the dustbin of history. But that takes some time.
= = =
But, speaking of the invisible hand: I'd like to see if we can get its input.
A company "needs" a foreign talent? It's not just using H1Bs to get cheap labor? OK. Then the talent is worth a lot of money, and should be paid it, right?
So lets try this:
- A cap on the number of H1Bs, some number N.
- And each year they go to the N candidates (or as renewals for those already here) being paid the highest salaries (with preference to those already employed in case of ties.)
You don't have to use Gmail. You can get your own hosting...
How nice for you.
But some of us are stuck with what our employers picked for the company's standard. (And we must use that, rather than going around it, because of the Sarbanes Oxley act's email retention requirements.)
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, why not just take the entire top-level domain down if there is an infringing page somewhere? Since we are going for the disproportional response, we might as well take it all the way...
Not quite the whole way.
Take down the Internet.
We all know it's just about piracy and free porn, anyhow.
... they did an analysis of yada yada and decided there was no such thing as seasonal affective disorder. googled it... https://www.scientificamerican...
With headline: "Study Finds "Seasonal Affective Disorder" Doesn't Exist"
Science is about getting closer to the truth by replacing less-accurate, inaccurate, and just plain wrong ideas with ones that are more accurate.
ANY study is subject to being found to be wrong or not-so-hot and its conclusions replaced by better ones.
Even if all the studies were performed perfectly and their data showed very strong support of the conclusions, some fraction would be wrong just because of data "noise".
There is NO "settled science". Just conclusions and models that have held up REALLY well - so far.
I was under the impression that
- "nG" was originally just an arbitrary marketing term, approximating "Our company's Nth generation of equipment, better than our (n-1)G service".
- As of 5G there IS a regulatory mandate from the ITU, but it's just for a set of minimal performance metrics, not a particular way to achieve them.
- So "5G" is not a STANDARD, but applies to a NUMBER of standards by which the which a carrier may chose to meet the required performance level. In particular;
--it does NOT guarantee interoperability with another carrier's "5G" branded offering
--If a carrier can achieve the required performance by appropriately configuring their 4G equipment (such as LTE and/or WiMax boxen) and the number of subscribers served by them, they are free to call it "5G".
1) A long ass wallpaper of job requirements that even after 20+ years in the industry with job references from multiple CEOs from successful companies and more current (and maintained honestly) certifications than most engineers, I don't meet half the requirements needed.
The first type, I know I can apply to it and get it usually because I understand the way job requirements are written. [after some research] I'll call a friend of a friend of a friend and get their boss to call me instead which will place me on better terms to list and negotiate my requirements.
That kind of job posting is what you see when they already have the candidate they want, but are required to post it and give others an "equal" chance at it. They don't want to switch. So they post a set of requirements that exactly matches the qualifications of the candidate they have in mind - all of them, not just the ones needed for the job. Few, if any, others will have every single oddball bit of experience the one they have in mind, so nobody comes by to rock the boat.
Sometimes it's impossible - because the actual candidate didn't have the qualifications, either, but had a fake resume. (That often happens with agencies bringing in H1-Bs. They do this so no real candidates can displace their warm body. My wife once hired one who supposedly had a masters in Comp Sci. The candidate didn't know about this, and risked her visa to point it out. My wife hired her because she DID have enough on the ball to do the job and was honest enough to tell truth to power even when it might be detrimental.)
If you do get through, and do convince them that you're a better pick, they'll have to post it again before they sign you up. So they'll make up another one exactly tuned to your history.
Now if they could just take down "Lisa from Credit Card Services" the phone scammer that called me on my cellphone just before I got to this.
Yeah, how dare they be concerned for their workers safety when they have to go out and fix something and your house is still feeding power back into what they are working on.
That's not an issue if your inverter isn't grid-tied.
(or tethered phone and run speed test.)
T-Mobile says: "We have coverage here, here, here ..." ..."
Little rural company says: "They lied! They don't have coverage there, there, there,
Should be trivial to check, without even any fancy equipment. Take a T-Mobile 4G phone to there, there, there, ... and make a call. "Can you hear me now?"
Now that both sides are on record, whichever is lying can be fined big time - which will more than pay for the FCC guy making the trip and tests.
000000
Caveats:
- The next page of the thread, dealing with bypassing two-factor authentication, is two "next"s forward.
- Poisoned Minds / S.S.D.D. is generally N.S.F.W. (Including the next few pages after the one linked.)
Can't we just make solar panels out of coal . . .
Out of carbon? Yes we can. A company has, for several years, been making them of carbon nanotubes and non-rare, not-particularly-toxic, not-silicon, nanodiode arrays.
Good point. Can someone smart please say how many Costcos this would be? Or football fields?
Costcos aren't all the same size. (Football fields would work, if you're neglecting the stands and the space between the field proper and the audience..)
... embedded wires to serve as the "windings" of a two-dimensional [linear] stepper motor.
Note that "stepper" motors don't HAVE to move in increments of the pole spacing (though many have pole pieces shaped to encourage this.) If the pole pieces are properly shaped, they can also be operated as a polyphase analog motor and driven to positions arbitrarily dividing the cycle. Then the electronics can provide "steps" substantially finer than the pole spacing (or even "pure analog" positioning). At displacements smaller than the winding spacing you get progressively less accurate, but you can still manage pretty good location control.
Also: Even with big steps you can draw a really accurate line (straight or curved) by taking advantage of the mass of the drawing system and the timing of the steps.
The scale of the manufacturing is indeed awesome, ...
Tell me about it.
One thing I heard about at the time (so I don't know for SURE if it was true, having just rumor, not personal experience or documentation) was the incremental plotter capable of making full-sized engineering drawings - of the entire plane. (Wow!)
Allegedly this consisted of a "plotter bed" the size of a hanger floor, with embedded wires to serve as the "windings" of a two-dimensional stepper motor. (I think the paper was held down by a vaccuum.) Add a "puck" with a pen, a vertical actuator, and a ground-effect vents, with the pen-lift controled and air supplied by a cable from the hanger roof (I imagine a hanger-sized coil-cord), and you would soon be able to see "the big picture". B-)
Or if you had smaller stuff to draw but needed multiple copies, just put several pucks on at the same time. They'd move in unison.
A few years ago there was a survey asking people where they got their news. The number one TV show people reported getting news from was The Daily Show, a comedy show.
So "news" these days, to most people, means Facebook or a comedian.
Given how much the mainstream media was caught faking the news, many perceive it as comedy already. So they probably decided they might as well watch a professional comedian do a more entertaining job of delivering honestly faked-as-convenient-for-him "infotainment-like art product".
At least he's more funny than the gloom-and-doom "news presenters".
Television news has been bunk since (at least) before the advent of Turner's original CNN. The network execs got the idea that people were watching news for entertainment rather than accurate information, and decided providing the former was cheaper. When all three (at the time) networks were doing it, there was nowhere for those who wanted TV news to turn, creating the market opportunity for Turner, and the new satellite/cable combination gave him the tech to seize it. (Unfortunately he sold out, first figuratively, then literally.)
Newspapers were ALWAYS one-sided and poorly researched bunk. (E.g.: "Yellow Journalism". Or all the way back to Franklin's health advice to avoid Jenner's vaccination.) Think: Did a newspaper EVER get it right for ANY story where you knew what was REALLY going on? Did they even spell the bride's name right?
Freedom of the Press works by letting ALL the biases have their own papers, giving every story, and all substantial sides of it, an opportunity to be heard. When newspapers consolidated down to one major outlet per city, that diversity was lost.
Now just about the only opportunity for news to flow freely is the Internet, and the main access point for those without an ongoing axe to grind is social media.
Sure it's a mix of facts, falsehoods, and fluff, and you have to do your own filtering. But the "professional news media" has pretty much ALWAYS been that. There were a few decades where broadcast was king, the cost kept the number of players down to those you could count on one hand, and they pretended to give accurate and unbiased coverage to everything of importance. But that illusion has been popped by general access to unedited Internet distribution.
Let's hope "The Invisible Hand" and "The Internet sees censorship as failure and routes around it" keeps that access open, as the major social media providers impose their own censorship.
Under Burdick, accepting a pardon is an admission of guilt. If a President were to pardon himself, he would be admitting guilt.
Not necessarily. That's only the default if the pardon doesn't speak to the issue. But it can, if he so chooses:
(Quoting Washington Post)
Also thanks to Prop 13, if the value of your property goes down, your taxes (usually) still go up!
Had that happen: The value went 'way down for a bit at one point during the housing crash. The assessor dropped the assessment and the taxes tracked it down.
Our assessor was good that way. Don't know if the person was conscientious or trying to head off a LOT of work from appeals, but the result of either is the same so I'll assume the first.
The value bubbled up again nicely once the crash was over. I didn't check to see if the ramp had ratcheted taxes down to a lower starting point or if it jumped back to the old slow ramp-up when things recovered. (Still have all the records so may yet check that - though not in time for this thread.) Even if it jumped back up I was ahead of where I'd have been without the bubble-pop-bigger-bubble so I'm not complaining.
Note that, thanks to prop 60 and 90, people OVER 55 can, ONCE IN THEIR LIVES, transfer their tax limit benefit to another house in the same county, IF it is the SAME OR LOWER VALUE, and can do the same to another county IF the other county passes a law to allow it.
So older Calafornians might be able to move, once, to a nearby and cheaper house, and not get zinged. But they can forget about moving up in the world, or moving at all more than once. So they save it for if/when they really need it.
In California under proposition 13 (and other places with similar laws) you have an additional factor.
Prop 13 and the like were intended to keep rising housing prices from leading to rising taxes that end up evicting the old owners. So they freeze the assessed value (with a slight inflation creep) to keep the taxes from skyrocketing with a real estate bubble.
But sell the house and the new owner gets reassessed, and taxed, at the selling price or current market prices, and current tax rates. Then buy a house, even on the other side of the same town, and it happens to you, too.
Our house has more than tripled in price since we bought it about 20 years ago, and the mortgage will be paid off in less than another year. If we wanted to move to a different one like it, we'd more than triple our taxes - to about where our current mortgage + insurance + tax payments are. And if we sold, then had to come back to work in the same area, even our current payments for a four-room house on an oversized lot wouldn't rent a one-room apartment within commuting distance of the jobs.
So we stay where we are, until I either strike it seriously rich, I retire and we can move clear out of state, or (fat chance) the law is adjusted so I can carry the Prop 13 tax abatement with me to a new place and (if necessary) back.
Such an awesome idea! I first thought of it a few years ago, and I imagine others too,
I didn't originate it. (Maybe you did. B-) )
But (like "sealing the dry cell in a steel can to keep it from wrecking the flashlight when the caustic eats through the zinc electrode"), it's "Of COURSE!" once somebody thinks of it and tells others.
Moore's Law potentially has a long way to run - because semiconductors are still only a few layers thick in the Z axis and there are a lot more doublings left before we're dealing with "chips" that are solid circuitry feet on a side. Non vacuum "vacuum tubes" are far less sensitive to high temperatures than semiconductors, so building 3-D structures of them won't have as much of a cooling problem. (You still need to dissipate all the heat, but you can let the structure get 'way hotter to encourage it to migrate out.)
Single Threading speed may be falling off its free ride on Moore's Law-like exponential scaling, as speed-of-light and electron-size leakage limits raise a wall. (Going 3-D will help some, by shortening paths, but not by a lot.) But lots of really useful computations are massively parallelizable. The should drive continued manufacture and deployment of higher-switch-count devices as the technology is developed and yields are brought up.
(I'd do it myself but I'm abandoning my mod points in this discussion in order to make a relevant posting.)
Funny, those polls were predicting a Democratic wave election and wow they were right!
As "waves" go it was a "Blue Ripple", compared to typical first-term-midterms losses. But you missed a couple other points:
First: He GAINED several seats in the Senate, where it really mattered.
Second: The Rs were going to lose the house anyway. So the US electorate (with Trump's assistance in the form of non-campaining for the R-side swamp creatures), took the opportunity to do some swamp-draining in the House.
Notice it was primarily the RINOs and Never Trumpers (that hadn't already retired) who were the losers.
Sorry, but the USA is NOT the centre of the universe.
So what? The rest of the world is welcome to try to develop and sell its own high tech, just like we did.
Meanwhile, the USA is where *I* live and work now. So foreign-worker laws, their interpretation and enforcement, along with management and investor fads, all matter to *MY* bottom line. Especially when I have founding stock options in a startup but not enough clout with the C-suite to keep them from committing corporate suicide.
For non-founders, though, the H1B system, as currently practiced, is the hi-tek white-collar version of the blue-collars' "undocumented laborer" problem, where imported workers with shaky legal status that keeps them from demanding legally-mandated working conditions (and other issues) results in not just depressing the wages of the citizen-worker competion, but drives things SO low that, without government enforcement, employers have the choice of hiring illegals or becoming so uncompetitive that they go out of business.
The alternative is to set up software hubs in those other countries.
Then watch your cutting-edge company dull and rot, as the 10-minute turnaround time for Q-A turns into one day due to the near-half-day time offset.
(It's especially a scream to watch management try to use Agile techniques across a 12-hour offset and a giant culture gap, too.)
And that's assuming you find exceptionally competent help. (Hint: There ARE really competent engineers in, say, India. But they're pretty much all employed, and paid substantially more than the bulk of the body-shop fodder which are most of what you get now.)
One way to solve the time gap issue is to move the whole operation, including architecture, design, and admin, offshore. But then your IP is over there and NOT over here. If they're not competent you're left with restarting from scratch or an older snapshot when you realize they've blown it (and you're now months or years behind in the race to the window). If they ARE competent, watch for them to quit and start their own company (with your IP, under their IP laws and (non-)enforcement), leaving you in the same position but with a new competitor.
Even with engineers of ordinary competence and the project split across the pond, offshoring can be of negative value: Your designer spends a bunch of time breaking off a chunk to be done overseas, then ends up doing the work himself anyhow, when the module doesn't arrive in time. So the added worker cost both his own pay plus a bunch of the time of the local guy on the critical path without any benefit from his work product.
The invisible hand will get around to swatting the company - perhaps into the dustbin of history. But that takes some time.
= = =
But, speaking of the invisible hand: I'd like to see if we can get its input.
A company "needs" a foreign talent? It's not just using H1Bs to get cheap labor? OK. Then the talent is worth a lot of money, and should be paid it, right?
So lets try this:
- A cap on the number of H1Bs, some number N.
- And each year they go to the N candidates (or as renewals for those already here) being paid the highest salaries (with preference to those already employed in case of ties.)
You don't have to use Gmail. You can get your own hosting ...
How nice for you.
But some of us are stuck with what our employers picked for the company's standard. (And we must use that, rather than going around it, because of the Sarbanes Oxley act's email retention requirements.)