The only "completely service based economy" is a bankrupt one. You can't run a society off of web pages, junk bonds and strip malls. You have to have the real basis of sustainable wealth: the manufacture of capital equipment.
This "service based economy" thing is a myth. It only betrays a deep ignorance of economics.
Actually, Ignorant Business Morons (or Ignorant Business MBAs, which is the same thing)... which is all you can say about anyone who thinks they can just dump hardware from their enterprise-support business model.
Obviously, IBM is still succumbing to the MBA/accountant/lawyer mode of thinking, where "the most profitable department of your business must become your ONLY department". The people doing this are like religious fanatics... they have a single, holy goal in mind (e.g. maximum profits) and are not open to even massive evidence to the contrary (e.g. businesses who concentrate on one product line tend to either fail, or suffer the business cycle that governs that one product line).
If IBM continues down this path, it will lose much of its market share for enterprise "solutions". This is particularly true when IBM has a lot of competition in such an area of so-called expertise.
In short, everyone cannot just give up on hardware, and then sell software and bodies. The software and bodies must follow a hardware base. That hardware base may certainly be less profitable than the sw/body side of your business, but a hand needs an arm no matter how useless the arm seems in most tasks. We cannot all be hands.
On Earth, it may be more confusing, but it's much, much more practical, since there's a ready consumer base for the production. We also don't need to wildly seed the planet with these things. If we can come up with a Von Neumann machine, we can set it to work in the Sahara and Gobi deserts, and in the oceans, and have the collective set of them simply create the things we can distribute to make sure everyone CAN be housed and fed.
We're not talking about specific tasks. That's the tree. We're instead talking about why we're doing all of it. That's the forest. You cannot run a project like the expansion of Humanity into the universe by constantly objectifying each task as a non-Human event. With that kind of methodology, no one will travel anywhere -- robots will instead carry remote sensory packages. Even you can see how foolish that is... with signal-propagation delays obliterating the usefulness of such a scheme.
The point to exploring something is to someday go there in person, and probably to go there for good sometime after that. Humans must live, work and play in space since that's the entire point to existing as a capable race.
The "to work" thing is very broad. But it's going to take real work to open the space frontier for colonization. It necessarily paves the way for further reaches, as well as returning value to the homeworld that makes the investment. The outstanding thing that we can "work" on in space is Solar Power Satellites. That would return significant value to Earth.
This understaffing will continue for the foreseeable future. There is a rising emphasis on getting the end user to perform support functions that would have otherwise involved a tech. For example, I'm hearing rumors of Dell's plans to ship replacement parts for their Optiplex computers directly to end users, to avoid paying for a tech to perform a field service call. Said parts would come along with instructions on how to change it. The modular and colorful design of the GX200-series Optiplexes obviously lends itself to a "find module, unplug, pull on green tab to remove" kind of maintenance.
Corporate America is trying hard to get rid of the lowest echelons of IT (i.e. the workers with the least power to resist wholesale layoffs). All it will take to succeed at that is to lower the expectations of the end user. This is entirely possible, since after all, we all pump our own gas, don't we?
You make a good implied point. Tents are cheap... cheap to obtain, repair and move. A robot-built cemented-soil dome-home even if cheap to build, still would be more expensive to repair, and of course cannot be moved. There are many other factors to consider for the homes of the poor. (For example, in my city of Toledo OH, even a free, conventional home would still be a problem since vast periods of unemployment await me... so how would I afford to eat, gas up my car, pay the property taxes, etc.?)
Perhaps. The thing I must admit is that a company the size of IBM certainly has the potential to "discover" on the basis of all the resources it routinely exploits. From this, I speculate that a large company's R&D department can act as a patent generator.
With all the construction efficiency drives we've undergone already, housing prices have still soared stratospherically. Hence, I don't expect your "if houses become cheaper" speculation to become true. Hence, the Wal*Mart wage trend is still a threat, and you are the one who's wrong.
Efficiency in housing is NOT winning us more accessible housing. If you find yourself unconvinced, grab a local housing guide and flip through the prices enough until you begin to understand.
There are some galactic events that can sterilize an entire galaxy on neutrino emissions alone. So, it's possible. However, it seems likely that:
the Milky Way not prone to explosive behavior
our home star Sol is not prone to explosive behavior
nearby stars are not brewing any supernovas
We are a bit lucky to be in such a stable zone. But this stability itself is probably why we had the time to evolve to the level we're at today, to even ask the question of "are we safe from astronomical events".
One could imagine sending these things out to distant worlds far in advance of our arrival.
With all the people on Earth who have inadequate and/or overpriced housing, don't you think we should try this on Earth first? Don't you think we should try creating utopias for Earth's teeming billions first?
Basically that sounds like Linus Torvalds' strategy. If he remains ignorant of patented work, he cannot be dinged for that x3 penalty for intentional patent infringement.
Makes you wonder, doesn't it? I speculate that IBM -- long used to being the patent holder of record -- is finding out that the very patent sytem that it took advantage of by "patent app bombing" is coming back upon them. They may be doing too much cross- or outright-licensing with other patent holders. (I'm sure IBM expects people to license patents from TEHM, not the other way around.) And I also speculate that IBM is finding out the overhead costs of patent investigation are rising, since the approval system is a rubber-stamp machine that doesn't adequately evaluate patent validity.
I have few illusions that IBM is doing this latest protest out of the goodness of their tiny, shriveled, black hearts.
Well, terminology-wise, you got me there. If the Congress has no liberals, just Democrats and left-leaning Republicans that we call "liberals", then I stand corrected.
You probably avoid noticing the rapt audiences to a GWB speech. His gift at speaking is essentially the same as his father's... that including extensive tough talk, invoking of religious feelings, and all the rest of the general appeal to our baser natures. It doesn't matter about your judgment about his skill... the real matter is that he has a hold over millions. And so did Hitler.
As for the puppet angle, you can't even begin to tell me that Hitler wasn't in thrall to Germany's business interests. War is always good for business... and CONQUEST is even better. Hitler was backed by conquest-driven economic base with the usual Imperial culture, and so now is GWB. War bit Hitler in the ass eventually, and so it's going to go with GWB. The similarities go on and on.
I was entirely correct: GWB is the first Hitler clone of the 21st Century. I shudder to think of ninety-five years more years of this Perpetual Conventional Warfare.
Gosh, a typical neo-con non-response to the outlandish Fascism exhibited by Your Beloved and Glorious Leader, George W. Bush the First. You can't possibly defend his murderousness, so you duck. Tell us again why this "jury's out" guy sent TEN TIMES as many troops into Iraq (where Osama bin Laden was NOT) than he sent into Afghanistan (where OBL probably WAS), and ZERO troops into Saudi Arabia (where OBL probably now IS)? You can't possibly defend that rhetorical truth, either. Who's "Bandar Bush"? Care to discuss that for a while? I doubt it. We wouldn't want to establish any nasty link between your Republican Godhead and those terrorist-supporting Saudis.
Go fuck yourself, Neo-Con. The only deliberation possible is what GWB will be doing like Kissinger does right now, by thinking carefully about what country he visits in case he's captured by local law enforcement and then indicted for his crimes against Humanity.
Imperialist shitbag. YOU...
LOVE...
MURDERING PEOPLE! And all the world can see that's perfectly true.
"You have adequately defended against every rebuttal I could readily come up with, however, I disagree."
This comment implies from your instructor implies to me that he was wise. He recognized that both sides of a highly bipolar issue can have well-constructed arguments yet be concurrently disagreeable. That's why we honor these things by saying "you're entitled to your opinion".
It can be argued that a "real A student" plays to the biases in each of her professors, hence tailors each essay. It can then be argued that this "real A student" has a superior intellect from that behavior. {shrug}
Habib is what is called a "hatchet man". He is brought in to give people the hatchet, to chop or cull them out of the business. In the end, when the hatchet man has cut enough people, he himself is given the hatchet. Unfortuantely for the American workforce, hatchet men move from company to company, being used like a freelance assassin with a seriously overdriven work ethic, wiping out hordes of workers. Habib is the ultimate expression of the mercenary consultant. In a way, we are all guilty of creating people like him.
Slashdot Mirror
The only "completely service based economy" is a bankrupt one. You can't run a society off of web pages, junk bonds and strip malls. You have to have the real basis of sustainable wealth: the manufacture of capital equipment.
This "service based economy" thing is a myth. It only betrays a deep ignorance of economics.
Actually, Ignorant Business Morons (or Ignorant Business MBAs, which is the same thing) ... which is all you can say about anyone who thinks they can just dump hardware from their enterprise-support business model.
... they have a single, holy goal in mind (e.g. maximum profits) and are not open to even massive evidence to the contrary (e.g. businesses who concentrate on one product line tend to either fail, or suffer the business cycle that governs that one product line).
Obviously, IBM is still succumbing to the MBA/accountant/lawyer mode of thinking, where "the most profitable department of your business must become your ONLY department". The people doing this are like religious fanatics
If IBM continues down this path, it will lose much of its market share for enterprise "solutions". This is particularly true when IBM has a lot of competition in such an area of so-called expertise.
In short, everyone cannot just give up on hardware, and then sell software and bodies. The software and bodies must follow a hardware base. That hardware base may certainly be less profitable than the sw/body side of your business, but a hand needs an arm no matter how useless the arm seems in most tasks. We cannot all be hands.
On Earth, it may be more confusing, but it's much, much more practical, since there's a ready consumer base for the production. We also don't need to wildly seed the planet with these things. If we can come up with a Von Neumann machine, we can set it to work in the Sahara and Gobi deserts, and in the oceans, and have the collective set of them simply create the things we can distribute to make sure everyone CAN be housed and fed.
If Open Source is Whoville, and IBM is the Grinch, then what is symbolized by the "roast beast"? SCO?
Thanks. Just when I think that our lack of vision can't get any more depressing, you toss off a one-liner that illusrates that yes, we CAN.
We're not talking about specific tasks. That's the tree. We're instead talking about why we're doing all of it. That's the forest. You cannot run a project like the expansion of Humanity into the universe by constantly objectifying each task as a non-Human event. With that kind of methodology, no one will travel anywhere -- robots will instead carry remote sensory packages. Even you can see how foolish that is ... with signal-propagation delays obliterating the usefulness of such a scheme.
The point to exploring something is to someday go there in person, and probably to go there for good sometime after that. Humans must live, work and play in space since that's the entire point to existing as a capable race.
The "to work" thing is very broad. But it's going to take real work to open the space frontier for colonization. It necessarily paves the way for further reaches, as well as returning value to the homeworld that makes the investment. The outstanding thing that we can "work" on in space is Solar Power Satellites. That would return significant value to Earth.
This understaffing will continue for the foreseeable future. There is a rising emphasis on getting the end user to perform support functions that would have otherwise involved a tech. For example, I'm hearing rumors of Dell's plans to ship replacement parts for their Optiplex computers directly to end users, to avoid paying for a tech to perform a field service call. Said parts would come along with instructions on how to change it. The modular and colorful design of the GX200-series Optiplexes obviously lends itself to a "find module, unplug, pull on green tab to remove" kind of maintenance.
Corporate America is trying hard to get rid of the lowest echelons of IT (i.e. the workers with the least power to resist wholesale layoffs). All it will take to succeed at that is to lower the expectations of the end user. This is entirely possible, since after all, we all pump our own gas, don't we?
I talk to "managers" and "technical staff" on a regular basis who can not distinguish cat5 from a phone chord.
:^)
Can you blame them? Both make a kind of "purring" sound.
You make a good implied point. Tents are cheap ... cheap to obtain, repair and move. A robot-built cemented-soil dome-home even if cheap to build, still would be more expensive to repair, and of course cannot be moved. There are many other factors to consider for the homes of the poor. (For example, in my city of Toledo OH, even a free, conventional home would still be a problem since vast periods of unemployment await me ... so how would I afford to eat, gas up my car, pay the property taxes, etc.?)
Perhaps. The thing I must admit is that a company the size of IBM certainly has the potential to "discover" on the basis of all the resources it routinely exploits. From this, I speculate that a large company's R&D department can act as a patent generator.
With all the construction efficiency drives we've undergone already, housing prices have still soared stratospherically. Hence, I don't expect your "if houses become cheaper" speculation to become true. Hence, the Wal*Mart wage trend is still a threat, and you are the one who's wrong.
Efficiency in housing is NOT winning us more accessible housing. If you find yourself unconvinced, grab a local housing guide and flip through the prices enough until you begin to understand.
- the Milky Way not prone to explosive behavior
- our home star Sol is not prone to explosive behavior
- nearby stars are not brewing any supernovas
We are a bit lucky to be in such a stable zone. But this stability itself is probably why we had the time to evolve to the level we're at today, to even ask the question of "are we safe from astronomical events".One could imagine sending these things out to distant worlds far in advance of our arrival.
With all the people on Earth who have inadequate and/or overpriced housing, don't you think we should try this on Earth first? Don't you think we should try creating utopias for Earth's teeming billions first?
Basically that sounds like Linus Torvalds' strategy. If he remains ignorant of patented work, he cannot be dinged for that x3 penalty for intentional patent infringement.
Makes you wonder, doesn't it? I speculate that IBM -- long used to being the patent holder of record -- is finding out that the very patent sytem that it took advantage of by "patent app bombing" is coming back upon them. They may be doing too much cross- or outright-licensing with other patent holders. (I'm sure IBM expects people to license patents from TEHM, not the other way around.) And I also speculate that IBM is finding out the overhead costs of patent investigation are rising, since the approval system is a rubber-stamp machine that doesn't adequately evaluate patent validity.
I have few illusions that IBM is doing this latest protest out of the goodness of their tiny, shriveled, black hearts.
Well, terminology-wise, you got me there. If the Congress has no liberals, just Democrats and left-leaning Republicans that we call "liberals", then I stand corrected.
You probably avoid noticing the rapt audiences to a GWB speech. His gift at speaking is essentially the same as his father's ... that including extensive tough talk, invoking of religious feelings, and all the rest of the general appeal to our baser natures. It doesn't matter about your judgment about his skill ... the real matter is that he has a hold over millions. And so did Hitler.
... and CONQUEST is even better. Hitler was backed by conquest-driven economic base with the usual Imperial culture, and so now is GWB. War bit Hitler in the ass eventually, and so it's going to go with GWB. The similarities go on and on.
As for the puppet angle, you can't even begin to tell me that Hitler wasn't in thrall to Germany's business interests. War is always good for business
I was entirely correct: GWB is the first Hitler clone of the 21st Century. I shudder to think of ninety-five years more years of this Perpetual Conventional Warfare.
Gosh, a typical neo-con non-response to the outlandish Fascism exhibited by Your Beloved and Glorious Leader, George W. Bush the First. You can't possibly defend his murderousness, so you duck. Tell us again why this "jury's out" guy sent TEN TIMES as many troops into Iraq (where Osama bin Laden was NOT) than he sent into Afghanistan (where OBL probably WAS), and ZERO troops into Saudi Arabia (where OBL probably now IS)? You can't possibly defend that rhetorical truth, either. Who's "Bandar Bush"? Care to discuss that for a while? I doubt it. We wouldn't want to establish any nasty link between your Republican Godhead and those terrorist-supporting Saudis.
...
...
Go fuck yourself, Neo-Con. The only deliberation possible is what GWB will be doing like Kissinger does right now, by thinking carefully about what country he visits in case he's captured by local law enforcement and then indicted for his crimes against Humanity.
Imperialist shitbag. YOU
LOVE
MURDERING PEOPLE! And all the world can see that's perfectly true.
"You have adequately defended against every rebuttal I could readily come up with, however, I disagree."
This comment implies from your instructor implies to me that he was wise. He recognized that both sides of a highly bipolar issue can have well-constructed arguments yet be concurrently disagreeable. That's why we honor these things by saying "you're entitled to your opinion".
It can be argued that a "real A student" plays to the biases in each of her professors, hence tailors each essay. It can then be argued that this "real A student" has a superior intellect from that behavior. {shrug}
Hopefully, being critical of the data supporting evolution is akin to arguing x+y ~= 4, where x and y are roughly equivalent to 2 apiece, depending.
Student: "But ... but ... but I salivated when I heard the bell ring! That's what I'm supposed to do!!"
Professor: {shakes his head sadly}
Habib is what is called a "hatchet man". He is brought in to give people the hatchet, to chop or cull them out of the business. In the end, when the hatchet man has cut enough people, he himself is given the hatchet. Unfortuantely for the American workforce, hatchet men move from company to company, being used like a freelance assassin with a seriously overdriven work ethic, wiping out hordes of workers. Habib is the ultimate expression of the mercenary consultant. In a way, we are all guilty of creating people like him.