Free internet poses risks. Risks are an opportunity for regulators to expand their fiefdom. The risk-averse public sector, if left unchecked (by unbalanced budgets) will take over the free economy like a bad antibiotic-immune staph infection, or auto-immune disease.
I deal internationally with many nations, and have repeatedly tried, but have never been able to do anything successfully in India. Despite low linguistic barriers, savvy businesspeople, educated populace, and an adorably intelligent PM (Singh), there is just an impossible number of bureaucrats to obtain approval from. I attribute it to a tipping-scale of public-sector employees set up by Indira Gandhi. Once you create a certain ratio of regulator jobs to the private sector jobs, it's very difficult to reverse it.
By 2nd analogy, regulators are like basketball referees, you need a few. but too many make it impossible to navigate the basketball court.
Public sector regulators do not get rewarded when things go right in the private sector (what did they have to do with it but stay out of the way?) but are punished for allowing it if something went wrong. It's by nature risk averse, and prone to setting limits on everything. It's easier for a public sector manager to hire a new person than to undertake the unpleasant and near-impossible task of laying off an unproductive person. To get new hires, you need a risk or danger (or type of foul) to protect the public from. At some point the public has such a stake in public sector job security (family with salaries from referee jobs) that it's nearly impossible to reverse, and the economy - the basketball game - slows and stagnates. Africa has the same problem.
Eventually, (my theory goes) incompetence sets in and almost appears to heal the public sector employment imbalance. The public bureaucracy becomes so crowded that nothing gets done, and the regulators start to feel anonymous and disenfranchised by the command-and-control network. China's Communist Party had so much corruption in the 1980s that the regulations were completely randomized, and the economy grew by accepted practice of ignoring entrenched regulators. The refs in China were blowing whistles that everyone ignored, basketball players passed and circled around them, or paid the regulator to sit off the court. Unfortunately, like (analogy 3) Lyme disease, the idled refs never really go away. Indira created lots of public sector employment. Hiring public employees is like feeding a (#4) dragon that gets bigger with every bite, and even if it's a nice dragon now, you will still be in the cage with it tomorrow.
The PC manufacturers not in business??? PC Clone makers Wistron (which spun off Acer), Foxconn (which makes.. for just everybody), BenQ etc. were grew based on the open source contracting model offered by Microsoft and IBM. Like Apple, Foxconn is no longer a PC company, if that's what you mean by out of the PC business. By opening the Android OS to tinkering, Google is doing what the PC market did - unleash Foxconn etc. Anonymous is right on one thing - Samsung is the giant in the ring, and the same move frees Wistron, BenQ, Foxconn to compete better against Samsung.
This is true. People are happier doing the same job where they are recognized, far more than they are satisfied by the same job where they are paid more and ignored. But this also disproves the concept in the article about "gamification". Current monetary policy is already a form of "gamification".
"Encouragement" and "motivation" means giving appreciation, whether it's money or tokens. "Gamification" seems to mean that someone gets to "play banker" or company Dungeon master, creating an alternative bureaucracy. The "new currency" in the game really just exposes the obvious - it's not all about paper, whether it's a check or a bill or a paper star. Society adapted tradeable currency long ago. You cannot really eat money or gold. Once "gold stars", D&D "experience points", "bitcoins" and other "attaboys" become tradeable, they become a commodity. Either it's no longer a game at that point, or the word "gamification" is describing something quite ordinary (motivation/encouragement), not a unique approach worthy of the dictionary.
They need to think outside the box. Professors may only a assign a chapter or two of a textbook as it is (one of the bones I had to pick about buying some in business school). Wikipedia is being built paragraph by paragraph with a kind of "open source" peer review. Khan Academy, RepairFAQ.org, and IFIXIT.org are other instructional models. I was relieved when Raytheon (military sales) exited the USA school textbook market (sold out DC Heath in 1995) and am not sure I want their textbooks back, by the way.
Now that he's finished "Dark Shadows", and in the spirit of "Mars Attacks!", and Edward Scissorhands etc., we really need Tim Burton to do a movie about North Korea. I think he could capture the ethos.
The award goes to CRT (cathode ray tube) displays, which are built like battleships. They work for 20 years. There has been a hoax promoted by environmental "watchdogs" that the CRTs are being hammered apart for copper, and California went as far as to pay 48 cents per pound (taxpayer money) to make sure all the CRTs are broken when turned in for collection, based on the myth that the display devices become obsolete by Moore's law.
The EPA's methodology for calculating recycling rates is as follows: Find annual production (e.g. plastic milk bottles, newspapers), input lifespan, and calculate waste generation. But they put "Moore's Law" in for the "lifespan" of tech equipment... e.g. that CRT monitors have a 3 year lifespan. They assumed that "replacement rate" (new purchases of hardware) was an indication of lifespan, even though the growth of internet use worldwide was in double digits, and that all the old CRT monitors, millions and millions, were being dumped in primitive wasteful conditions.
Try applying the same methodology to used cars... that replacement purchase equals lifespan. OMG!!! We must have a massive death star of used cars crowding our landfills!!
The growth of the internet has been 10 times the rate, for the past decade, in nations with per capita incomes of $3-4K per year. They can't afford brand new display devices and were purchasing the CRTs for the past decade. Someone made up a completely bogus statistic that they were being burned in landfills in the developing world, something now completely disproven (the photos of TVs at the dumps in Nigeria were from NIGERIANS, who have had TV since the 1980s.. the scrap in Guiyu China comes predominantly from Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhuo). The story of the CRT is finally winding down as LCDs get cheaper and cheaper, but it has been amazing the mythology and hoaxes spread about CRT exports during the past decade. http://tinyurl.com/ghanahoax
It wasn't all that long ago that we had a "bastion" of people in Waco who rejected the idea that the Moon is not a source of light, but reflects light from the Sun... So I have trouble believing the Global Warming debate will end with this NYT announcement. http://tinyurl.com/billnyemoon
If the death rate reduces, and population increases, then evolution will be faster than ever, as no unique DNA trait goes extinct. Of course, all bets are off in the event of nuclear war etc. catches us up in the "natural selection" department. But assuming natural variance is continuing, and if anything society protects the "differently abled", then we could spawn several new species in even fewer hundreds of millions of years than "we" did last time.
RTFA... this is not even a strike. This is the union threatening a strike... over cafeteria menu and the bus being too crowded (by all the people wanting to come to work at Foxconn). If you remove the words "Apple" and the (gasp) Taiwanese ODM "Foxconn", there is no story here at all. Nothing.
Agreed. Going green saves money. But the blame cuts both ways. People who merely try to save money by going the cheapest route often save the environment without getting credit. In the recycling industry, for example, the recyclers who offer the best price are often accused of "cutting corners" but actually often justify the price through energy savings which they pass along. Our environmental bretheren too often assume that a more expensive method (e.g. trains) is superior to a less expensive method (Greyhound buses). Take replacing lead solder with ROHS lead free solder. Lead Free was considered more expensive but less toxic. But they replaced the toxic (mostly recycled content) lead with tin from Indonesian coral islands, a net loss to the environment and carbon. If it's cheaper it may be better for the environment, even if your intent was only to save money.
Fifteen or twenty years ago, the buzz was about diminishing rain forests. Before that, it was extinction. It seems like people get tired of a world consumption message, give up on caring, and look for a new "problem" to warn ourselves about. Warming is the new rain forest, which was the new extinction. As a fifty year old environmentalist, I wonder how wise it was to take peoples focus off of habitat and onto thermometers. We need big forests to suck up the carbon. Now, that arrow is gone.
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Free internet poses risks. Risks are an opportunity for regulators to expand their fiefdom. The risk-averse public sector, if left unchecked (by unbalanced budgets) will take over the free economy like a bad antibiotic-immune staph infection, or auto-immune disease.
I deal internationally with many nations, and have repeatedly tried, but have never been able to do anything successfully in India. Despite low linguistic barriers, savvy businesspeople, educated populace, and an adorably intelligent PM (Singh), there is just an impossible number of bureaucrats to obtain approval from. I attribute it to a tipping-scale of public-sector employees set up by Indira Gandhi. Once you create a certain ratio of regulator jobs to the private sector jobs, it's very difficult to reverse it.
By 2nd analogy, regulators are like basketball referees, you need a few. but too many make it impossible to navigate the basketball court.
Public sector regulators do not get rewarded when things go right in the private sector (what did they have to do with it but stay out of the way?) but are punished for allowing it if something went wrong. It's by nature risk averse, and prone to setting limits on everything. It's easier for a public sector manager to hire a new person than to undertake the unpleasant and near-impossible task of laying off an unproductive person. To get new hires, you need a risk or danger (or type of foul) to protect the public from. At some point the public has such a stake in public sector job security (family with salaries from referee jobs) that it's nearly impossible to reverse, and the economy - the basketball game - slows and stagnates. Africa has the same problem.
Eventually, (my theory goes) incompetence sets in and almost appears to heal the public sector employment imbalance. The public bureaucracy becomes so crowded that nothing gets done, and the regulators start to feel anonymous and disenfranchised by the command-and-control network. China's Communist Party had so much corruption in the 1980s that the regulations were completely randomized, and the economy grew by accepted practice of ignoring entrenched regulators. The refs in China were blowing whistles that everyone ignored, basketball players passed and circled around them, or paid the regulator to sit off the court. Unfortunately, like (analogy 3) Lyme disease, the idled refs never really go away. Indira created lots of public sector employment. Hiring public employees is like feeding a (#4) dragon that gets bigger with every bite, and even if it's a nice dragon now, you will still be in the cage with it tomorrow.
The PC manufacturers not in business??? PC Clone makers Wistron (which spun off Acer), Foxconn (which makes .. for just everybody), BenQ etc. were grew based on the open source contracting model offered by Microsoft and IBM. Like Apple, Foxconn is no longer a PC company, if that's what you mean by out of the PC business. By opening the Android OS to tinkering, Google is doing what the PC market did - unleash Foxconn etc. Anonymous is right on one thing - Samsung is the giant in the ring, and the same move frees Wistron, BenQ, Foxconn to compete better against Samsung.
Oh, you've already met? This is how Microsoft and PCs beat Apple in the 90s... Taipei was Jobs' Waterloo
This is true. People are happier doing the same job where they are recognized, far more than they are satisfied by the same job where they are paid more and ignored. But this also disproves the concept in the article about "gamification". Current monetary policy is already a form of "gamification".
"Encouragement" and "motivation" means giving appreciation, whether it's money or tokens. "Gamification" seems to mean that someone gets to "play banker" or company Dungeon master, creating an alternative bureaucracy. The "new currency" in the game really just exposes the obvious - it's not all about paper, whether it's a check or a bill or a paper star. Society adapted tradeable currency long ago. You cannot really eat money or gold. Once "gold stars", D&D "experience points", "bitcoins" and other "attaboys" become tradeable, they become a commodity. Either it's no longer a game at that point, or the word "gamification" is describing something quite ordinary (motivation/encouragement), not a unique approach worthy of the dictionary.
They need to think outside the box. Professors may only a assign a chapter or two of a textbook as it is (one of the bones I had to pick about buying some in business school). Wikipedia is being built paragraph by paragraph with a kind of "open source" peer review. Khan Academy, RepairFAQ.org, and IFIXIT.org are other instructional models. I was relieved when Raytheon (military sales) exited the USA school textbook market (sold out DC Heath in 1995) and am not sure I want their textbooks back, by the way.
Law of supply and demand dictates we need superheroes. Artificially reducing the number of X-Ray superheroes will upset the unnatural balance.
"For desert, we have an ice cream peanut butter pie, blueberry cake, or the antidote for the poison you ate earlier."
Now that he's finished "Dark Shadows", and in the spirit of "Mars Attacks!", and Edward Scissorhands etc., we really need Tim Burton to do a movie about North Korea. I think he could capture the ethos.
The award goes to CRT (cathode ray tube) displays, which are built like battleships. They work for 20 years. There has been a hoax promoted by environmental "watchdogs" that the CRTs are being hammered apart for copper, and California went as far as to pay 48 cents per pound (taxpayer money) to make sure all the CRTs are broken when turned in for collection, based on the myth that the display devices become obsolete by Moore's law.
The EPA's methodology for calculating recycling rates is as follows: Find annual production (e.g. plastic milk bottles, newspapers), input lifespan, and calculate waste generation. But they put "Moore's Law" in for the "lifespan" of tech equipment... e.g. that CRT monitors have a 3 year lifespan. They assumed that "replacement rate" (new purchases of hardware) was an indication of lifespan, even though the growth of internet use worldwide was in double digits, and that all the old CRT monitors, millions and millions, were being dumped in primitive wasteful conditions.
Try applying the same methodology to used cars... that replacement purchase equals lifespan. OMG!!! We must have a massive death star of used cars crowding our landfills!!
The growth of the internet has been 10 times the rate, for the past decade, in nations with per capita incomes of $3-4K per year. They can't afford brand new display devices and were purchasing the CRTs for the past decade. Someone made up a completely bogus statistic that they were being burned in landfills in the developing world, something now completely disproven (the photos of TVs at the dumps in Nigeria were from NIGERIANS, who have had TV since the 1980s.. the scrap in Guiyu China comes predominantly from Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhuo). The story of the CRT is finally winding down as LCDs get cheaper and cheaper, but it has been amazing the mythology and hoaxes spread about CRT exports during the past decade. http://tinyurl.com/ghanahoax
LOL, The semicolon, apostrophe and exclamation point pose special challenges
Does this mean we can pinpoint the time and place of Eden, when Adam and Eve bit the apple that led to this cell division?
Anonymous just announced they can imitate my mouse movement. Damn that was fast, I don't even have a more current reference for it.
and an offensive strike is simply defensive.
Taiwan is to circuitry what Japan was to radio technology. http://www.intel.com/jobs/china/students/
It wasn't all that long ago that we had a "bastion" of people in Waco who rejected the idea that the Moon is not a source of light, but reflects light from the Sun... So I have trouble believing the Global Warming debate will end with this NYT announcement. http://tinyurl.com/billnyemoon
Takeoff and landing
Ran out of breath, returned to his hammock. Nothing to read here.
If the death rate reduces, and population increases, then evolution will be faster than ever, as no unique DNA trait goes extinct. Of course, all bets are off in the event of nuclear war etc. catches us up in the "natural selection" department. But assuming natural variance is continuing, and if anything society protects the "differently abled", then we could spawn several new species in even fewer hundreds of millions of years than "we" did last time.
RTFA... this is not even a strike. This is the union threatening a strike... over cafeteria menu and the bus being too crowded (by all the people wanting to come to work at Foxconn). If you remove the words "Apple" and the (gasp) Taiwanese ODM "Foxconn", there is no story here at all. Nothing.
And don't even ask about the amount of hard drive space to Photoshop the cosmos.
Agreed. Going green saves money. But the blame cuts both ways. People who merely try to save money by going the cheapest route often save the environment without getting credit. In the recycling industry, for example, the recyclers who offer the best price are often accused of "cutting corners" but actually often justify the price through energy savings which they pass along. Our environmental bretheren too often assume that a more expensive method (e.g. trains) is superior to a less expensive method (Greyhound buses). Take replacing lead solder with ROHS lead free solder. Lead Free was considered more expensive but less toxic. But they replaced the toxic (mostly recycled content) lead with tin from Indonesian coral islands, a net loss to the environment and carbon. If it's cheaper it may be better for the environment, even if your intent was only to save money.
Fifteen or twenty years ago, the buzz was about diminishing rain forests. Before that, it was extinction. It seems like people get tired of a world consumption message, give up on caring, and look for a new "problem" to warn ourselves about. Warming is the new rain forest, which was the new extinction. As a fifty year old environmentalist, I wonder how wise it was to take peoples focus off of habitat and onto thermometers. We need big forests to suck up the carbon. Now, that arrow is gone.
When these things go off, wise men and kings go hunting for babies to garnish with bling.
Nature doesn't make things invisible, it evolves camouflage - extra data points to confuse. People should tell more lies via email. Oh, wait..
In Vermont, you can reach your senators just by shouting loudly enough. In Wyoming, they use smoke signals.