The science is in. If you divert millions of acre-feet of water to fulfill environmental regulations, you can't use that water for other stuff. If you stop building reservoirs and dams to store water while increasing water usage, you won't have enough water. If agriculture water prices went up enough that the agribusinesses used 12.5% less water, then every residential and industrial user in CA could use 50% more water.
Let's see, Presidential election results after 1964, your chosen "they've been dying" since landmark: R R D R R R D D R R D D So 7 R to 5 D... yeah, looks like an ongoing landslide for the D's over that time.
Current Congress? House = R, Senate = R Current States? R's control 70% of the state legislative bodies.
Basically the ONLY level of elected office the Republicans don't currently control is the White House, and if you think Hilary is going to win that in 2016... well, you can keep going with your wishful thinking there...
No. Happily, the Hugo's have multiple categories and multiple works/people nominated per category.
Ideally, SF awards will be for the best SF works as voted on by SF fans, not taken over by literary elitists (the same type of folks who used to look down over their noses to say SF wasn't real literature, if they deigned to notice it at all) who want to use it to push their latest social cause.
The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies slates weren't about not having women and minorities win. Both slates included several women and minorities and even some left-wing writers who had to be publicly "horrified" the wrong people liked their work.
They're about wanting Hugo nominees/winners that reflect science fiction and what they consider the best story, rather than the last decade or so style of being nominated because the author is a leftist non-white male who includes the properly politically correct representatives in their story, even though the story itself isn't remotely the best SF story of the year. They're about wanting the winners to reflect SF fans, rather than just a small insular group of NY elites in the publishing business. Looking at you, Tor.
If you wonder why there seems to be a big gap of 12-15 years where not a lot of new good SF authors came out in book form, except from Baen, it's because the literary elite decided SF should be about identity politics instead of about science and speculation. SP/RP are about taking the field back for real SF that the fans of SF like, not the kind where it's "important" because it shows a woman musing about how the evil corporations are ruining the environment but if only her homosexual boyfriend would wake up from his coma they could live happily ever after mutually respecting each other in hipster anguish. -Gasp-
We also discussed the challenge of recruiting more women to open source projects and women in the KDE community.
Why?
How about asking about the challenges of recruiting more GUI designers, or more programmers, or more QA testers, or more of some group KDE specifically needs more of. Why ask about women?
It's almost like there's some sort of additional agenda beyond just interviewing the KDE folks....
Have they considered asking economists about the effects of price controls on water for agricultural uses?
Sometimes the obvious answer is the correct one... if you hold down the price of water, people (especially larger users) will use more of it, not less of it...
ok, I'll bite. I understand how the internet works as well as most people who don't spend most of their time writing RFCs (I owned an ISP back in the dial-up days and I've configured BGP as a network admin).
However, I also understand public choice economics and the fact that once the FCC begins to regulate the Internet (in the name of Net Neutrality), their incentives are driven by the politics of the commissioners (hence why this decision was 3 Dems vs. 2 Reps) and by the companies they regulate. It's nice when that sometimes coincides with the interests of the "regular guy", but it typically doesn't over time. Examples from history abound. See Baptists and Bootleggers.
I also understand that Comcast vs. Netflix was about contractual rights and was solved by the various parties making private agreements for bandwidth and transit usage, not by government regulation.
The supposed "reason" for the FCC regulations (prioritizing content providers by ISPs) isn't something that is actually happening in a widespread manner nor negatively affecting consumers, so why give a small government body control over the Internet so that they can over time regulate it pretty much however they want to.... and by want to, I mean how their political and embedded corporate interests want them to.
I'm happy to agree with you that Mozilla had every right to do what they did. Allowing people/companies, etc... make bad choices about what to do with their own resources is a valuable part of freedom. They just suffer the consequences if it was a bad choice.
Nothing you wrote disputes my point that when a company's values become more focused on A rather than B, when they used to be known for B, they will tend to drift off of success at B.
It applies to companies, people, countries, etc... they become successful because of a positive trait/action (like hard work, innovation, whatever) and then they become prideful and change their focus to something else and lose track of the values that got them there, then wonder why they start becoming less successful over time.
Someone's freedom doesn't extend to me being required to agree with them, just that I don't use force to stop them. Of course, many folks have lost sight of that, seeming to want to punish people for disagreeing with them on the latest controversial issue.
Well, what do you expect with all the science deniers in Congress and the White House? If the Democratic Party members took global warming as seriously as the Republicans do, they'd quickly cut out the red tape and solve this nuclear waste storage issue in order to economically reduce reliance on fossil fuels, as places like Arizona do. Instead, they chase after non-scientific stuff like biofuels, where the science is settled.
It's nice to see that Microsoft is finally ready to get out of beta with their 1.0 release soon, even if some folks probably still don't think they're quite ready for it yet...
Yeah, I'm waiting for someone to run a broadcast radio or TV advertisement that says something like "Hey Siri, Call 703 555 1212 (pay per call line) or "Hey Siri, Directions to XYZ business", or even "Hey Siri, search for malicious iPhone jailbreak website". You can also substitute in "Ok Google" as well to catch android phones...
Yeah. Oil prices go up for a while because of new demand, people figure out new techniques and start putting into production more wells, so oil prices go down and keep going down until some of the wells aren't profitable at the new prices, so they stop producing and the prices start going up, then the well and oil rights owners start producing more again and the prices goes back down again, and so on and so forth.
It's all just basic supply and demand curves, tied into a little technology and some lag times for changes. The only people who should be surprised are those folks who bought into the whole peak oil thing, somehow believing that we were magically going to run out of something that currently has more proven sources than are remotely economically workable at current prices/technological levels, but that can provide enough petroleum products to last the world for thousands of years... and more are discovered/proven every day when people bother to look for them.
Bottom line for what you want, which is FreeBSD, start with the manual.
Then go to the releases and pick the latest production, i.e. stable, release (Currently 10.1). Everything will be stable and binaries and source packages for your desired functions will all be available and up to date.
if you want a dedicated machine for one specific purpose, then another BSD might be better, but for multiple purposes/general purpose, just use FreeBSD. It'll be just as good as the others for specific purposes (just not by default, you'll have to run a command to install software, big deal), many of which have a FreeBSD source.
Ever read mainstream news reporting about a topic you were very familiar with? Perhaps something related to technology, or a local issue you were in the middle of?
Most people have had that experience. The more you know about something, the less the story seems to be accurate.
Yeah, all the rest of the news stories are about that accurate also, people just mostly don't notice.
Think about it.... it's mostly some j-school grad who asked a couple people some questions to get quotes, then threw the "story" together. Usually they're lucky if they understood what they were told, let alone can explain it in a manner which actually enlightens their audience.
My best luck as been with subject matter experts who blog on news topics related to their subject. So I get my economics news and analysis from economics professors (not the pet ones in the NY Times), my legal news from law professors and judges who blog, my technical news from a technical site focused on that part of the industry, etc...
Even then you have to be willing to read multiple viewpoints to try and see a bigger picture than one voice is going to paint for you.
Operating systems for gaming computers? I suppose your Playstation and your Wii and your Steam Machine run windows and WINE doesn't exist? Dude, don't confuse a monopoly with having a big market share.
De Beers managed to get to 85-90% of the world market for diamonds, not quite an actual monopoly... but as the diamondmarket is international, couldn't get all the governments to protect their market position by granting an actual monopoly and requiring their customers to purchase only their products. Guess what their market % is now? 40%? Lower? I guess they didn't have a natural monopoly after all.... market forces and all that.
Monsanto? No need to even go there in terms of IP. There are hundreds of seed companies farmers can buy from. Yeah, Monsanto is one of the biggest (at around 35% of the corn and soybean market share, just below DuPont) because many of their customers like their product combinations (pest control + seeds that resist it), but if another company came along tomorrow offering a better deal, how long would their market share last? One season, two? You're reading too much anti-GM propaganda and not looking at the actual facts.
Show me a monopoly in the United States that isn't enforced by the government and you might be able to start to make a point here.
The reality is that power company monopolies exist most everywhere in the U.S. today because the government legally requires things to be that way.
Companies have no power to enforce a monopoly without the government making laws giving them a monopoly. Even if a capitalist managed to achieve a local monopoly on something, the only thing keeping their competitors away is if the barriers to entry are larger than the potential profit.
You can claim that there are some natural monopolies, but if these are actually natural monopolies, then why would it require a law to prevent anyone from competing with them?
When you have government price controls (see for example, your local public utility commission), the natural result is that the company they've setup as a monopoly has only an incentive to deliver the worst possible service they can get away with, spending the least possible on everything, and pocket the rest.
It works that way in every industry it's been tried, so there shouldn't be a big surprise it works that way in the local electricity market. The real question is why do we keep having our government set things like this up... oh, that's right, most people are ignorant of basic economics and public choice theory.
Why do people keep conflating complete government control of an industry, to the point where the government outright decides who your local power company is and exactly how much they charge you, with capitalism? You could make a good case for calling that model socialism, or communism, or even fascism, but it's the exact opposite of any sort of market-based capitalism...
Sure, when the people in government decide to take complete control of an industry, the people in the industry become reduced to working their government masters for their own benefit, but the issue there isn't a lack of government power.
Ever heard of a public utilities commission? They're the ones who approve rates, expansion, rules for how the power company functions, etc...
Fukushima and Chernobyl are deadly enough reminders.
Would it surprise you to learn that the deaths from producing renewables is orders of magnitude higher than the deaths from all the reactor meltdowns combined?
If so, do a little research and prepare to be surprised.
Exactly. The biggest issue is that it's difficult for a PHB, even a technical one, to reliably determine ahead of time who is worth 2x what everyone else is getting for a particular technology job and who is worth 1/2.
Then once someone is hired, in most companies HR makes it impossible to either give appropriate raises to those who actually deserve it or to get rid of those who aren't worth their salary as long as they're minimally performing.
Unregulated last mile wiring looks like this [ggpht.com]. It's a "natural monopoly" because the alternative is a dangerous, unmaintainable eyesore.
Except of course, as best as I can tell, your image appears to be from India, where the companies responsible for those poles are chosen as regional monopolies heavily regulated by the government. That short of undercuts your argument....
I agree that a co-op is a decent middle ground, especially in rural areas where the residents may be more interested in the services than might be otherwise profitable for companies to create the infrastructure. The key for me to that is that the co-op actually be voluntary, not a co-op in name only, but really just another required-by-the-government organization that they decided to name a co-op.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a solution for your CA home water issues.
Ready? Stop voting for Democrat environmentalists.
The science is in. If you divert millions of acre-feet of water to fulfill environmental regulations, you can't use that water for other stuff. If you stop building reservoirs and dams to store water while increasing water usage, you won't have enough water. If agriculture water prices went up enough that the agribusinesses used 12.5% less water, then every residential and industrial user in CA could use 50% more water.
Yeah, well, Obama's smoking habit is statistically more likely to have impacted his daughter's asthma (his example) than global warming ever will.
I guess there's no good having a boogeyman if you can't blame everything you've ever seen as a problem on it...
Let's see, Presidential election results after 1964, your chosen "they've been dying" since landmark:
R
R
D
R
R
R
D
D
R
R
D
D
So 7 R to 5 D... yeah, looks like an ongoing landslide for the D's over that time.
Current Congress? House = R, Senate = R
Current States? R's control 70% of the state legislative bodies.
Basically the ONLY level of elected office the Republicans don't currently control is the White House, and if you think Hilary is going to win that in 2016... well, you can keep going with your wishful thinking there...
No. Happily, the Hugo's have multiple categories and multiple works/people nominated per category.
Ideally, SF awards will be for the best SF works as voted on by SF fans, not taken over by literary elitists (the same type of folks who used to look down over their noses to say SF wasn't real literature, if they deigned to notice it at all) who want to use it to push their latest social cause.
The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies slates weren't about not having women and minorities win. Both slates included several women and minorities and even some left-wing writers who had to be publicly "horrified" the wrong people liked their work.
They're about wanting Hugo nominees/winners that reflect science fiction and what they consider the best story, rather than the last decade or so style of being nominated because the author is a leftist non-white male who includes the properly politically correct representatives in their story, even though the story itself isn't remotely the best SF story of the year. They're about wanting the winners to reflect SF fans, rather than just a small insular group of NY elites in the publishing business. Looking at you, Tor.
If you wonder why there seems to be a big gap of 12-15 years where not a lot of new good SF authors came out in book form, except from Baen, it's because the literary elite decided SF should be about identity politics instead of about science and speculation. SP/RP are about taking the field back for real SF that the fans of SF like, not the kind where it's "important" because it shows a woman musing about how the evil corporations are ruining the environment but if only her homosexual boyfriend would wake up from his coma they could live happily ever after mutually respecting each other in hipster anguish. -Gasp-
Why?
How about asking about the challenges of recruiting more GUI designers, or more programmers, or more QA testers, or more of some group KDE specifically needs more of. Why ask about women?
It's almost like there's some sort of additional agenda beyond just interviewing the KDE folks....
Have they considered asking economists about the effects of price controls on water for agricultural uses?
Sometimes the obvious answer is the correct one... if you hold down the price of water, people (especially larger users) will use more of it, not less of it...
ok, I'll bite. I understand how the internet works as well as most people who don't spend most of their time writing RFCs (I owned an ISP back in the dial-up days and I've configured BGP as a network admin).
However, I also understand public choice economics and the fact that once the FCC begins to regulate the Internet (in the name of Net Neutrality), their incentives are driven by the politics of the commissioners (hence why this decision was 3 Dems vs. 2 Reps) and by the companies they regulate. It's nice when that sometimes coincides with the interests of the "regular guy", but it typically doesn't over time. Examples from history abound. See Baptists and Bootleggers.
I also understand that Comcast vs. Netflix was about contractual rights and was solved by the various parties making private agreements for bandwidth and transit usage, not by government regulation.
The supposed "reason" for the FCC regulations (prioritizing content providers by ISPs) isn't something that is actually happening in a widespread manner nor negatively affecting consumers, so why give a small government body control over the Internet so that they can over time regulate it pretty much however they want to.... and by want to, I mean how their political and embedded corporate interests want them to.
Except of course... that photograph is of a highly regulated environment in India with strict government granted monopoly.
So in other words, the photo shows the exact opposite of your argument to be bad...
I'm happy to agree with you that Mozilla had every right to do what they did. Allowing people/companies, etc... make bad choices about what to do with their own resources is a valuable part of freedom. They just suffer the consequences if it was a bad choice.
Nothing you wrote disputes my point that when a company's values become more focused on A rather than B, when they used to be known for B, they will tend to drift off of success at B.
It applies to companies, people, countries, etc... they become successful because of a positive trait/action (like hard work, innovation, whatever) and then they become prideful and change their focus to something else and lose track of the values that got them there, then wonder why they start becoming less successful over time.
Someone's freedom doesn't extend to me being required to agree with them, just that I don't use force to stop them. Of course, many folks have lost sight of that, seeming to want to punish people for disagreeing with them on the latest controversial issue.
At least they didn't talk about how Mozilla are leaders in the diversity movement and have pride in having a different standard.
I guess once you put politically correct groupthink over people with a proven track record of innovation, innovation starts to suffer and go away.
This process is also known a "Bad Luck". Sounds like Mozilla is suffering from bad luck...
Well, what do you expect with all the science deniers in Congress and the White House? If the Democratic Party members took global warming as seriously as the Republicans do, they'd quickly cut out the red tape and solve this nuclear waste storage issue in order to economically reduce reliance on fossil fuels, as places like Arizona do. Instead, they chase after non-scientific stuff like biofuels, where the science is settled.
It's nice to see that Microsoft is finally ready to get out of beta with their 1.0 release soon, even if some folks probably still don't think they're quite ready for it yet...
Yeah, I'm waiting for someone to run a broadcast radio or TV advertisement that says something like "Hey Siri, Call 703 555 1212 (pay per call line) or "Hey Siri, Directions to XYZ business", or even "Hey Siri, search for malicious iPhone jailbreak website". You can also substitute in "Ok Google" as well to catch android phones...
Yeah. Oil prices go up for a while because of new demand, people figure out new techniques and start putting into production more wells, so oil prices go down and keep going down until some of the wells aren't profitable at the new prices, so they stop producing and the prices start going up, then the well and oil rights owners start producing more again and the prices goes back down again, and so on and so forth.
It's all just basic supply and demand curves, tied into a little technology and some lag times for changes. The only people who should be surprised are those folks who bought into the whole peak oil thing, somehow believing that we were magically going to run out of something that currently has more proven sources than are remotely economically workable at current prices/technological levels, but that can provide enough petroleum products to last the world for thousands of years... and more are discovered/proven every day when people bother to look for them.
Bottom line for what you want, which is FreeBSD, start with the manual.
Then go to the releases and pick the latest production, i.e. stable, release (Currently 10.1). Everything will be stable and binaries and source packages for your desired functions will all be available and up to date.
if you want a dedicated machine for one specific purpose, then another BSD might be better, but for multiple purposes/general purpose, just use FreeBSD. It'll be just as good as the others for specific purposes (just not by default, you'll have to run a command to install software, big deal), many of which have a FreeBSD source.
Don't forget to push each of your versions of this through the FDA's medical device approval process....
Ever read mainstream news reporting about a topic you were very familiar with? Perhaps something related to technology, or a local issue you were in the middle of?
Most people have had that experience. The more you know about something, the less the story seems to be accurate.
Yeah, all the rest of the news stories are about that accurate also, people just mostly don't notice.
Think about it.... it's mostly some j-school grad who asked a couple people some questions to get quotes, then threw the "story" together. Usually they're lucky if they understood what they were told, let alone can explain it in a manner which actually enlightens their audience.
My best luck as been with subject matter experts who blog on news topics related to their subject. So I get my economics news and analysis from economics professors (not the pet ones in the NY Times), my legal news from law professors and judges who blog, my technical news from a technical site focused on that part of the industry, etc...
Even then you have to be willing to read multiple viewpoints to try and see a bigger picture than one voice is going to paint for you.
Operating systems for gaming computers? I suppose your Playstation and your Wii and your Steam Machine run windows and WINE doesn't exist? Dude, don't confuse a monopoly with having a big market share.
De Beers managed to get to 85-90% of the world market for diamonds, not quite an actual monopoly... but as the diamondmarket is international, couldn't get all the governments to protect their market position by granting an actual monopoly and requiring their customers to purchase only their products. Guess what their market % is now? 40%? Lower? I guess they didn't have a natural monopoly after all.... market forces and all that.
Monsanto? No need to even go there in terms of IP. There are hundreds of seed companies farmers can buy from. Yeah, Monsanto is one of the biggest (at around 35% of the corn and soybean market share, just below DuPont) because many of their customers like their product combinations (pest control + seeds that resist it), but if another company came along tomorrow offering a better deal, how long would their market share last? One season, two? You're reading too much anti-GM propaganda and not looking at the actual facts.
Show me a monopoly in the United States that isn't enforced by the government and you might be able to start to make a point here.
The reality is that power company monopolies exist most everywhere in the U.S. today because the government legally requires things to be that way.
Companies have no power to enforce a monopoly without the government making laws giving them a monopoly. Even if a capitalist managed to achieve a local monopoly on something, the only thing keeping their competitors away is if the barriers to entry are larger than the potential profit.
You can claim that there are some natural monopolies, but if these are actually natural monopolies, then why would it require a law to prevent anyone from competing with them?
When you have government price controls (see for example, your local public utility commission), the natural result is that the company they've setup as a monopoly has only an incentive to deliver the worst possible service they can get away with, spending the least possible on everything, and pocket the rest.
It works that way in every industry it's been tried, so there shouldn't be a big surprise it works that way in the local electricity market. The real question is why do we keep having our government set things like this up... oh, that's right, most people are ignorant of basic economics and public choice theory.
Why do people keep conflating complete government control of an industry, to the point where the government outright decides who your local power company is and exactly how much they charge you, with capitalism? You could make a good case for calling that model socialism, or communism, or even fascism, but it's the exact opposite of any sort of market-based capitalism...
Sure, when the people in government decide to take complete control of an industry, the people in the industry become reduced to working their government masters for their own benefit, but the issue there isn't a lack of government power.
Ever heard of a public utilities commission? They're the ones who approve rates, expansion, rules for how the power company functions, etc...
Fukushima and Chernobyl are deadly enough reminders.
Would it surprise you to learn that the deaths from producing renewables is orders of magnitude higher than the deaths from all the reactor meltdowns combined?
If so, do a little research and prepare to be surprised.
Exactly. The biggest issue is that it's difficult for a PHB, even a technical one, to reliably determine ahead of time who is worth 2x what everyone else is getting for a particular technology job and who is worth 1/2.
Then once someone is hired, in most companies HR makes it impossible to either give appropriate raises to those who actually deserve it or to get rid of those who aren't worth their salary as long as they're minimally performing.
Except of course, as best as I can tell, your image appears to be from India, where the companies responsible for those poles are chosen as regional monopolies heavily regulated by the government. That short of undercuts your argument....
I agree that a co-op is a decent middle ground, especially in rural areas where the residents may be more interested in the services than might be otherwise profitable for companies to create the infrastructure. The key for me to that is that the co-op actually be voluntary, not a co-op in name only, but really just another required-by-the-government organization that they decided to name a co-op.