When I was 18 and started college, I worked out at the gym 4 times a week for 8 months. I jogged, I used cardio machines, I did endurance training on the weight machines, etc. It never got any easier. Oh sure, I got stronger, and I could go further before I had to stop. But I felt just as bad the whole time. I still threw up if I ran for more than one city block. I even saw a doctor about it -- they said I was in great shape, low blood pressure, low body fat, etc. Eventually they put me on drugs to help with the insomnia and mood problems, which thankfully made me too lethargic to continue going to the gym. According to doctors, I have no real physical health problems, and any psychiatric problems I have seem to be grossly exacerbated by regular exercise.
"No pain, no gain" has to be the stupidest expression ever coined by anyone, ever. Healthy people are usually born healthy, and stay healthy naturally. They find exercise easy and mostly painless. They gain despite a near-total lack of pain. Unhealthy people are born that way, and will feel awful for most of their lives despite a total lack of gain. I put myself through a great deal of pain, and ultimately gained nothing.
Ironically, I recently found a much better way to stay in shape. 5 minutes of mild stretching and a prescription for a small dose of dexadrine. I'm fitter and happier than I ever was when I was working out, and can get whatever small amount of exercise I need just walking from time to time. So much for the miracle of working out.
Now, since I've ALREADY taken your six month challenge (eight months, actually), I've seen the doctors, I've talked to the physical trainers, I win the bet. You can send the $100 to Mark Fairchild, 12 Stratford Avenue, Burnaby BC, V5B 4P5.
Believe, I've gone for long enough to get the endorphins to kick in. That's the only reason I can workout at all. But endorphins aren't the all-powerful feel-good drug that training fanatics make them out to be. They only make you feel good if there isn't much pain to begin with. Otherwise, all they do is make you feel cloudy-headed and just slightly less agonized and miserable. And as your body dumps more and more of them into your system, the endorphins can make you REALLY sick, not at all unlike their synthetic analogs, morphine and heroin.
This is very important, so say it with me now: NOT EVERYONE IS THE SAME. What makes jock-assholes feel good will do just the opposite to other people. If I used the same kind of delusional logic that you're using, I'd go around telling people that they should avoid the sunshine in the morning, because it will put them to sleep. Indeed, if I don't keep my curtains closed, the sunshine will knock me right out. But thankfully, I'm not an idiot, and I realize that some people may respond differently than I do.
I hate to throw around the insults, but you really are a moron. This is basic stuff; if you're old enough to operate a computer and type things, you're old enough to have noticed that people respond to things differntly.
It DOES just seem like brain cells must be dying. Just like how when you run a car until the tank is dry, the circuitry all shorts-out. I mean, isn't it obvious? Parts of the brain die everytime anyone becomes exhausted!
Huh...
I think we know whose brain is really suffering from some cell-death.
It's always funny to see how people that work-out assume that because it makes them feel good, it must make everyone feel good. This is usually followed up by some thinly veiled self-righteousness.
People who don't exercise are often the way they are because exercise makes them feel HORRIBLE. Personally, I've tried to get into shape a number of times. But after three or four weeks of working out, I just can't take it anymore -- the pain, the exhaustion, the depression, the undirected feelings of anger, none of it. The worst part is the insomnia. I normally have trouble sleeping, but exercise -- no matter when in the day it takes place -- makes it much worse. Then some jock asshole tries to tell me that I'd be able to sleep better if I just got some exercise. That I'd feel happier if I just exercised now and then.
I'm sure that more blood gets to my brain when I exercise, but that's not necessarily helpful. The distracting, unpleasant parts of the brain get stimulated too. Try taking an overdose of uppers and see how that makes you feel; not all stimulation is positive. Or consider how alcohol, a depressant, can make people MORE happy and energetic by depressing the parts of the brain holding the person back.
I don't know, I think decentralization solves the particular issues that you mention perfectly. Abortion? Let each person make up their own mind and make their own decision. It seems to work perfectly. The Iraq war? Wouldn't it be better if each person had a little checkbox on their tax return where they could indicate whether or not they wanted to pay the additional tax monies required to fund the war? Or better yet, anyone who favoured the war could just send a cheque to their local militia, which could ship off as many soldiers as it could afford. Or even better yet, anyone who favoured the war could just buy a gun and go die their on their own, leaving the rest of you out of it (I'm not American, so it doesn't really affect me at all other than to necessitate numerous assertions of my Canadian nationality if I go abroad).
There are certainly areas where decentralization doesn't work, and committees do have advantages over single decision-makers. A committee's indecisiveness can reveal that a problem may require a more subtle answer than simply yes or no. The sloth that committees demonstrate can give stakeholders more opportunity to impress their needs on the minds of the committee-members. Sometimes, simply failing to make a decision is better than any of the options being considered. But creativity? Assertiveness? Boldness? Never. The committee can't accomplish these things.
Eh, no problem. What opinions and biases are those? I'd have hoped that most of what I've communicated is simply fact -- the facts about whether one can afford health insurance with a 20-hour a week minimum wage job, the facts about what the Canadian Liberal party advocates, about what Neoliberalism constitutes, and about what Libertarianism constitutes. I've tried to keep opinion out of it, beyond explicitly stating my opinion that people who oppose public healthcare are literally advocating the premature deaths of people like me.
Maybe they SHOULD gripe about Clinton and his "consulting". How much do you want to bet that when Cheney goes back into the private sector in two years, he'll start getting lucrative "consulting" jobs from the companies that he's been giving American citizens' tax money to?
Actually, the Clintons probably are worse, since -- as a pair -- they have both political office and the chance to sell it to the private sector, something that Republicans can never achieve thanks to their Christian values about the immorality of wives being employed. I'm not personally sure what types of business Bill is involved in, but I'm sure there's something.
Americans need to start getting serious about crucifying politicians for their conflicts of interest. Every goverment has problems with that, but none so severely as the US.
Strictly speaking, there is no neoliberal position on individual liberties and Human rights. The Liberal party that I originally mentioned is quite progressive about both, but that's a separate issue from Neoliberalism. Typically though, they take the position of protecting rights and liberties, while libertarians just want to prevent the government from impinging on those things.
The local healthcare? My position is probably VERY biased. I'm a student, and can't afford any healthcare coverage of any kind, beyond what the government provides. In the US, even with the cheapest, most basic healthcare insurance, I would have to choose between health coverage and buying food. This issue was driven home for me by the fact that within a week of moving out on my own, I developed a severe form of appendicitis and had to spend four days in the hospital. One year later, I got an inguinal hernia, which I would not have even been able to have treated at all in the US since it's not an acute condition.
I actually only know one person who has had much experience with the US healthcare system, and that's only because she had to go to San Diego for an experimental form of Gamma Knife surgery that wasn't available anywhere else... and even then, the BC government paid for the surgery and every aspect of the entire trip other a couple of tickets to the San Diego zoo.
So the local healthcare? I'd rate it awesome, since the alternative for me is NO healthcare... beyond emergency conditions that would necessitate my declaring bankruptcy afterwards. Naturally, I have little patience for those that believe their need to pay slightly lower taxes is worth more than my need to not be dead from a ruptured appendix (or my desire to not have a lump of peritoneum sticking two inches out of my abdomen). Of course without the social support system, I wouldn't even BE in university -- the social support system is part of what keeps the price of tuition for students down, what provides the student loan system I depend on to supplement my meagre income from my part time job, what supports the weird public-private transit system I use to get to school, etc. For that matter, without the social support system, I wouldn't have been able to go to school at all until I was 14, when my parents' income was finally high enough to not qualify as "hideously destitute", and I certainly wouldn't have been able to start university 4 years later.
Well, neoliberalism refers strictly to economic liberalism -- maximizing the economic freedom of the state's citizens and corporations. Neoliberals are very much into deregulation, free-trade, and they usually only interfere with monopolies if those monopolies are having a detrimental effect on their industry.
Libertarians believe in freedom from the government -- so even government policies that are intended to guarantee the preservation of certain freedoms (whether social or economic) are considered unacceptable. Really, a very different idea altogether.
As for healthcare, the conflict between public healthcare and free markets is almost completely imaginary. Even in a single-payer system like Canada's (the extreme of socialist healthcare), all the equipment is still bought on the market, the employees can quit, take new jobs, and negotiate aggressively for benefits and salaries, many services are provided by the private sector or are not covered at all by the public system, etc. Most medical specialists run private clinics -- the government will pay the bill if your doctor refers you to one, but I can still go to any dermatologist I want, at anytime I want, and pay whatever they care to charge. A system like Canada's does fail in the sense that hospitals aren't in competition with each other, but that has nothing to do with public healthcare; many nations have public healthcare systems in which public hospitals compete with each other AND with private hospitals.
Public heathcare is just another social safety net, and doesn't interfere with free markets at all. It's no different than how disability assistance money doesn't stop the market for foodstuffs from operating freely, or cause the job market to collapse. Or the way that the existence of police forces doesn't prevent private security from being a highly lucrative field to work in (if you don't mind getting attacked by the occasional junkie with a hypodermic).
Socialism is NOT my government of choice. I like a neoliberal government with socialist tendencies. You know, free markets, free trade, and a nice social-support network.
Two minutes seems optimistic to me; any idea worth even cursory examination would almost certainly require a more detailed examination. I mean, we're not talking about going through a pile of drawings looking for our favourite. We're talking about proposals for a website, something that would be inherently complex. Some good ideas could be missed (a proposal every two minutes is an aggressive rate), and there will undoubtedly by at least one false positive at some point. And I don't even know that 1/1000 is a realistic rate of good ideas. The internet brings out the stupidest in everyone. None of us is as stupid as all of us.
I could just be too suspicious of mass-collaboration (and yet I'm addicted to Wikipedia... the irony of it all). That's why I'm a libertarian-social-demofascistocrat with communocapitilocrastic tendencies that puts beef gravy on his tofu.
Democracies are sometimes good at waging war, and for precisely the reason I've described: when the chips are down, and the stake is all in, they put a "war group" together to make the hard decisions. The US and the UK both did this. In each, a small group of generals were given wide-ranging power to wage total-warfare on their own terms, right down to the level of managing the economy and controlling the "free" press. A democracy can emulate any other form of government as needed -- that's its strength. You want a theocracy? Elect your priests. You want totalitarianism? Elect the GOP. You want free markets? Elect the Liberals(*). You want libertarianism? Well, you're probably fucked for that one unfortunately. But you get the idea.
The allies won because they put a few extremely clever domain-experts in charge of their war efforts. The Nazis and Fascists lost because they selected the people that would manage the war effort based on cronyism. Cronyism is the surest path to defeat, other than maybe nepotism (upon election, politicians should have their family and friends summarily murdered to prevent such odious hiring policies). And the Bush government? They engage in rampant cronyism -- and as predicted, they can't win a war to save their lives. Under current political conditions, America could be conquered by a pack of racoons.
Hitler, in particular, arranged things so that he would always be told exactly what he wanted to hear. That's what cronies are good at. And Bush does the same thing. 9/11? Oh, we're sure that Iraq was involved. The iraqi people? They'll welcome us with open arms, they will. Mission accomplished? You bet! Being a born-again Christian? No, that's not even remotely retarded! Being too illiterate to read the CIA's reports about Bin Laden? You're better off without that evil book-learnin' anyway.... and sure enough, Dubya has no concept of reality, no idea what's going on in the real world, and has fucked up every war decision he has ever made. It takes world-class incompetence for the world's most powerful and advanced military to fail so consistently at everything it does.
(*) The Liberals are a Canadian Neoliberal political party, one that unfortunately has no analog in the US; they're like what the Democrats SHOULD be. Deep respect for personal freedom, only marginal nanny-state tendencies, and a godlike command of economics. Not socialist enough for my tastes, but I bet Americans could dig them as their left-wing party.
I have heard the term toff before. We demi-british do get exposed to enough of the BBC's sloppy seconds(*) to pick up on these things.;)
The free subscriptions are actually a pretty clever idea, in my opinion. They give out a bunch of six-month subscriptions, but they give them out as part of this idea-gathering project, so that people feel like they're getting a prize rather than a free sample designed to lure them into a lifetime of purchasing the magazine. I mean, common -- these dudes study economics. Duping saps(%) is their meat and potatoes. If they do somehow garner a useful idea out of all this, bonus.
(*) This is a... nevermind.
(%) We Canadians are big believers in taking money away from stupid people. After all, our entire economy is based on taking money away from Americans and selling them rocks, sticks, and ice.
This whole conversation was worthwhile, just for the fact that I have now been compared to Ayn Rand. When asked which historical figure I would most like to give a ritualistic bitch-slapping to, I almost invariably choose Ayn Rand (I can't hate Nietzche, since he at least had the decency to go completely fucking insane by the end of his life).
It's interesting that you bring up free markets. I would suggest that free markets actually fit perfectly into the points that I have made. Free markets function as a bottom-up, emergent phenomenon. Committees are the opposite -- they are an authoritarian, top-down form of management. Lots of people interact to develop a solution, but it still comes down to one decision that everyone is stuck with. The free market is a million people driving in a million directions all at once. If there's anything interesting to be found, someone is going to find it, even if only by accident. The committee is a million people loaded into a single bus, all yanking on the steering wheel at once. Sure, the bus will probably go somewhere -- but it's doubtful that it's a direction that anyone actually wants it to go. If you want that bus to get somewhere specific and useful, you designate one person to be the driver and let him operate the bus; and you try to designate someone that actually has some idea how to drive a bus and get it somewhere that people might actually want to be. And that is centralized, authoritarian leadership. That's not to say that people don't get some say in which bus they ride, or that they can't have the driver replaced if necessary. But driving is definitely not a collaborative activity.
Decentralization abolishes both the committee AND the despot. Or rather, by allowing agents to operate independently, each agent can function as a despotism of one. You, making decisions for yourself, are the very antithesis of a committee. That's what I dig about decentralization, at least for those domains in which it works.
The point is that the USA and England each put small authoritarian groups in charge of their war efforts. In fact, part of the reason that England and her allies fared so poorly at first was that they DIDN'T operate in a centralized, fascist manner. It took the downfall of France and some early setbacks during the battle of Britain before they got their shit together. Both the USA and the UK were operating in an extremely Communist (in the Stalin sense, not the Marx sense) fashion by the end of the war. And when you consider the amazing feats that the Soviets themselves pulled off -- overcoming such ridiculously horrible initial results in the war -- you can't help but be amazed by what authoritarian leaders can do.
The big thing that Japan and Germany had going against them was that they were stuck with the authoritarian leaders that they had, leaders that were geared for waging the kind of blitzkrieg warfare that characterized the early portions of World War 2; the USA and the UK (and the USSR... sort of) appointed authoritarian military leaders that were primed for the kind of warfare that they were actually dealing with at that point. And of course, Germany and Japan had comparitively little industrial capacity compared to England, let alone the combined industrial capacity of the commonwealth or the unheard-of levels of industrial capacity of the USA. But none of that would have meant a thing without commanders that had the power to act relatively arbitrarily and autonymously. That's EXACTLY what happened in Vietnam, and EXACTLY what's happening in Iraq. The commanders can't do the things they need to, because they have ass-hats like Rumsfeld trying run the war as a public-relations exercise. All the industrial capacity and technological superiority in the world is meaningless without the kind of good strategy that comes from putting a small number of domain-experts in charge.
I actually started reading it once, but got distracted by the necessity of learning COM and ASP for work. If I could do it all again, I probably wouldn't have accepted a job in which knowing COM was considered anything other than a character flaw.
Exactly. It's a bit funny to think that the "democratic" and "capitalist" powers were operating as -- for all intents and purposes -- Communist dictatorships. It got results though; didn't America manage to field somewhere on the order of fifteen MILLION servicemen? That's greater than the population of most of the world's cities, and more than a few of the world's nations. Even Canada got about a million servicemen together, a remarkable feat for a nation of 25 million or so (although still less per-capita than Britain or some of the other commonwealth nations). But my God, 15 million. Even if only a fraction of them were ever sent overseas, it's a staggering number of people to trolly around. I doubt any contemporary government could manage anything like it. Canada had trouble evacuating just a few thousand people from Lebanon last year.
So they get 10,000 ideas submitted by ideas, and then we get more idiots to choose the best from among them? I take it you don't live in a democratic nation. Voting en-mass gives you results that are -- at best -- mildly horrible. At least when a small expert group makes a decision, you get the nice cleanly defined possibilities of -- at best -- awesome, paradigm-changing ideas, and -- at worst -- world-shatteringly stupid and evil. It's good to have such polarized outcomes, because it makes it easier to decide who will be up against the wall.
The Mythical Man Month, if I recall correctly, is a book. That would seem to be significantly LESS succinct than my garbled pseudo-paragraph. Unless of course you mean the phrase itself -- which actually makes a lot more sense and is the very epitome of brevity.
Democracy is a horrible form of government. Can you point out even a single example of a democratic state that doesn't operate in a state of complete and utter lunacy?
The problem with Vietnam and Iraq is precisely the fact that they were run by committee. Congress got to periodically hamstring the war effort, senators got to earmark funds for projects that did nothing more than keep useless people employed, generals couldn't agree on how to wage the war and were going in a dozen directions at once. In Vietnam, the government couldn't even agree to have the goddam basic courage to admit that they were waging war and not a "police action". In Iraq, there isn't even any clear military leadership -- Bush is such a complete and utter retard that he puts civilian and corporate leaders in charge of a military effort and lets them completely ignore the actual military experts.
Your confusion stems from the fact that you assume that ANY handful of people will be equivalent. I'm talking about a handful of COMPETENT people.
How do you find the five best ideas in a hail of "advice" from 10,000 people? You can't -- it's molecules of gold in a river. Valuable in theory, completley worthless in practice, because it's unrecoverable.
The only thing democracies have going for them is that they can assign power to where it's most usefully employed -- small groups of experts that are close to the problem domain. Committees are only marginally better than small groups of idiots. Despotic governments routinely outperform democracies. That's the main reason that communist governments are so good at waging war. It's just that there's no way to ensure that despotic governments remain competent, or to replace them once they lose their way. That's the main reason that communist governments are so BAD at running their economies in the long-term. Democracies have the flexibility to go both ways -- to operate despotically when necessary, and to revert to the nice, safe, lowest-common-denominator shittiness of committee thinking the rest of the time.
This seems doomed to failure. You think comittee thinking is bad? Imagine a comittee of tens of thousands or more. Filtering good ideas out of the gibberish would be a gargantuan undertaking -- probably one that is more difficult than just thinking up your own ideas. Didn't the article say that they got some of the best minds in the business? So why would those great minds turn to a few thousand sub-mediocre minds? Given the choice, I'll take half a dozen smart people locked in a room with a whiteboard and an espresso machine over ten thousand jackasses making decisions by mob thinking.
It's interesting how in every modern war, the government that wins (assuming there is anything even vaguely like a winner) invariably puts a very small group of top military minds in charge of the war effort, even to the point of managing relevant aspects of the economy. Losers do just the opposite -- they let their legislature, congress, senate, president, chairman, corporate interests, beauracrats, and cronies make war decisions. And naturally, they either make retarded decisions or they rob the public blind at the expense of the war effort.
Comittee thinking is a disease. The bigger the comittee, the worse it gets. Human collaborative efficiency for creative works tops out at around 4 or 5 people. If you hope to invent new paradigms, you'll be hard-pressed to accomplish it with even as many a three people, and even two is pushing it.
Nerves react to electricity, but that doesn't require that electrical conduction is the method by which signals propagate. The potential change across the membranes in neurons may be an effect, not a cause. It could be even more complex, with the soliton causing the potential change at its leading edge, which in turn keeps the soliton focused as the it passes (solitons generally do occur in systems that are changed by the soliton as it passes).
One article does not make a new paradigm, but it's interesting nevertheless. Hopefully new experiments will generate data that confirms or denies the theory. But mindless dismissal of something because it challenges conventional ideas? That's precisely the kind of thing that holds science back, and leads to intellectual weaknesses like conservativism and jazz-appreciation.
Incidentally, the release of heat from chemical processes can be measured with extraordinary precision. Heat does not get "lost in the thermal noise". The very concept contradicts thermodynamics; any heat that is produced increases the level of thermal noise by definition. We're not talking about some quantum process that slips below the radar; cells are big, classical entities, and nerves are giants among cells.
Wouldn't reasonable people value both the quality AND the content of communication? It doesn't matter how perfectly Britney Spears enunciates (hypothetically) when she sings -- her songs are still moose-dribble. And Kurt Cobain may have had deeply profound lyrics, but hardly anyone would know because his singing was totally incomprehensible. The drooling mumbly guy at the psych hospital may be speaking deep truths, but how would you know? Karl Marx communicated and Ayn Rand both communicated their ideas extremely well (judging by the number of people that don't laugh out loud at the mere mention of them), but that doesn't make their ideas any less stupid and irrational.
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"No pain, no gain" has to be the stupidest expression ever coined by anyone, ever. Healthy people are usually born healthy, and stay healthy naturally. They find exercise easy and mostly painless. They gain despite a near-total lack of pain. Unhealthy people are born that way, and will feel awful for most of their lives despite a total lack of gain. I put myself through a great deal of pain, and ultimately gained nothing.
Ironically, I recently found a much better way to stay in shape. 5 minutes of mild stretching and a prescription for a small dose of dexadrine. I'm fitter and happier than I ever was when I was working out, and can get whatever small amount of exercise I need just walking from time to time. So much for the miracle of working out.
Now, since I've ALREADY taken your six month challenge (eight months, actually), I've seen the doctors, I've talked to the physical trainers, I win the bet. You can send the $100 to Mark Fairchild, 12 Stratford Avenue, Burnaby BC, V5B 4P5.
This is very important, so say it with me now: NOT EVERYONE IS THE SAME. What makes jock-assholes feel good will do just the opposite to other people. If I used the same kind of delusional logic that you're using, I'd go around telling people that they should avoid the sunshine in the morning, because it will put them to sleep. Indeed, if I don't keep my curtains closed, the sunshine will knock me right out. But thankfully, I'm not an idiot, and I realize that some people may respond differently than I do.
I hate to throw around the insults, but you really are a moron. This is basic stuff; if you're old enough to operate a computer and type things, you're old enough to have noticed that people respond to things differntly.
Huh...
I think we know whose brain is really suffering from some cell-death.
People who don't exercise are often the way they are because exercise makes them feel HORRIBLE. Personally, I've tried to get into shape a number of times. But after three or four weeks of working out, I just can't take it anymore -- the pain, the exhaustion, the depression, the undirected feelings of anger, none of it. The worst part is the insomnia. I normally have trouble sleeping, but exercise -- no matter when in the day it takes place -- makes it much worse. Then some jock asshole tries to tell me that I'd be able to sleep better if I just got some exercise. That I'd feel happier if I just exercised now and then.
I'm sure that more blood gets to my brain when I exercise, but that's not necessarily helpful. The distracting, unpleasant parts of the brain get stimulated too. Try taking an overdose of uppers and see how that makes you feel; not all stimulation is positive. Or consider how alcohol, a depressant, can make people MORE happy and energetic by depressing the parts of the brain holding the person back.
There are certainly areas where decentralization doesn't work, and committees do have advantages over single decision-makers. A committee's indecisiveness can reveal that a problem may require a more subtle answer than simply yes or no. The sloth that committees demonstrate can give stakeholders more opportunity to impress their needs on the minds of the committee-members. Sometimes, simply failing to make a decision is better than any of the options being considered. But creativity? Assertiveness? Boldness? Never. The committee can't accomplish these things.
Eh, no problem. What opinions and biases are those? I'd have hoped that most of what I've communicated is simply fact -- the facts about whether one can afford health insurance with a 20-hour a week minimum wage job, the facts about what the Canadian Liberal party advocates, about what Neoliberalism constitutes, and about what Libertarianism constitutes. I've tried to keep opinion out of it, beyond explicitly stating my opinion that people who oppose public healthcare are literally advocating the premature deaths of people like me.
Actually, the Clintons probably are worse, since -- as a pair -- they have both political office and the chance to sell it to the private sector, something that Republicans can never achieve thanks to their Christian values about the immorality of wives being employed. I'm not personally sure what types of business Bill is involved in, but I'm sure there's something.
Americans need to start getting serious about crucifying politicians for their conflicts of interest. Every goverment has problems with that, but none so severely as the US.
The local healthcare? My position is probably VERY biased. I'm a student, and can't afford any healthcare coverage of any kind, beyond what the government provides. In the US, even with the cheapest, most basic healthcare insurance, I would have to choose between health coverage and buying food. This issue was driven home for me by the fact that within a week of moving out on my own, I developed a severe form of appendicitis and had to spend four days in the hospital. One year later, I got an inguinal hernia, which I would not have even been able to have treated at all in the US since it's not an acute condition.
I actually only know one person who has had much experience with the US healthcare system, and that's only because she had to go to San Diego for an experimental form of Gamma Knife surgery that wasn't available anywhere else ... and even then, the BC government paid for the surgery and every aspect of the entire trip other a couple of tickets to the San Diego zoo.
So the local healthcare? I'd rate it awesome, since the alternative for me is NO healthcare ... beyond emergency conditions that would necessitate my declaring bankruptcy afterwards. Naturally, I have little patience for those that believe their need to pay slightly lower taxes is worth more than my need to not be dead from a ruptured appendix (or my desire to not have a lump of peritoneum sticking two inches out of my abdomen). Of course without the social support system, I wouldn't even BE in university -- the social support system is part of what keeps the price of tuition for students down, what provides the student loan system I depend on to supplement my meagre income from my part time job, what supports the weird public-private transit system I use to get to school, etc. For that matter, without the social support system, I wouldn't have been able to go to school at all until I was 14, when my parents' income was finally high enough to not qualify as "hideously destitute", and I certainly wouldn't have been able to start university 4 years later.
Libertarians believe in freedom from the government -- so even government policies that are intended to guarantee the preservation of certain freedoms (whether social or economic) are considered unacceptable. Really, a very different idea altogether.
As for healthcare, the conflict between public healthcare and free markets is almost completely imaginary. Even in a single-payer system like Canada's (the extreme of socialist healthcare), all the equipment is still bought on the market, the employees can quit, take new jobs, and negotiate aggressively for benefits and salaries, many services are provided by the private sector or are not covered at all by the public system, etc. Most medical specialists run private clinics -- the government will pay the bill if your doctor refers you to one, but I can still go to any dermatologist I want, at anytime I want, and pay whatever they care to charge. A system like Canada's does fail in the sense that hospitals aren't in competition with each other, but that has nothing to do with public healthcare; many nations have public healthcare systems in which public hospitals compete with each other AND with private hospitals.
Public heathcare is just another social safety net, and doesn't interfere with free markets at all. It's no different than how disability assistance money doesn't stop the market for foodstuffs from operating freely, or cause the job market to collapse. Or the way that the existence of police forces doesn't prevent private security from being a highly lucrative field to work in (if you don't mind getting attacked by the occasional junkie with a hypodermic).
Socialism is NOT my government of choice. I like a neoliberal government with socialist tendencies. You know, free markets, free trade, and a nice social-support network.
I could just be too suspicious of mass-collaboration (and yet I'm addicted to Wikipedia... the irony of it all). That's why I'm a libertarian-social-demofascistocrat with communocapitilocrastic tendencies that puts beef gravy on his tofu.
The allies won because they put a few extremely clever domain-experts in charge of their war efforts. The Nazis and Fascists lost because they selected the people that would manage the war effort based on cronyism. Cronyism is the surest path to defeat, other than maybe nepotism (upon election, politicians should have their family and friends summarily murdered to prevent such odious hiring policies). And the Bush government? They engage in rampant cronyism -- and as predicted, they can't win a war to save their lives. Under current political conditions, America could be conquered by a pack of racoons.
Hitler, in particular, arranged things so that he would always be told exactly what he wanted to hear. That's what cronies are good at. And Bush does the same thing. 9/11? Oh, we're sure that Iraq was involved. The iraqi people? They'll welcome us with open arms, they will. Mission accomplished? You bet! Being a born-again Christian? No, that's not even remotely retarded! Being too illiterate to read the CIA's reports about Bin Laden? You're better off without that evil book-learnin' anyway. ... and sure enough, Dubya has no concept of reality, no idea what's going on in the real world, and has fucked up every war decision he has ever made. It takes world-class incompetence for the world's most powerful and advanced military to fail so consistently at everything it does.
(*) The Liberals are a Canadian Neoliberal political party, one that unfortunately has no analog in the US; they're like what the Democrats SHOULD be. Deep respect for personal freedom, only marginal nanny-state tendencies, and a godlike command of economics. Not socialist enough for my tastes, but I bet Americans could dig them as their left-wing party.
The free subscriptions are actually a pretty clever idea, in my opinion. They give out a bunch of six-month subscriptions, but they give them out as part of this idea-gathering project, so that people feel like they're getting a prize rather than a free sample designed to lure them into a lifetime of purchasing the magazine. I mean, common -- these dudes study economics. Duping saps(%) is their meat and potatoes. If they do somehow garner a useful idea out of all this, bonus.
(*) This is a ... nevermind.
(%) We Canadians are big believers in taking money away from stupid people. After all, our entire economy is based on taking money away from Americans and selling them rocks, sticks, and ice.
It's interesting that you bring up free markets. I would suggest that free markets actually fit perfectly into the points that I have made. Free markets function as a bottom-up, emergent phenomenon. Committees are the opposite -- they are an authoritarian, top-down form of management. Lots of people interact to develop a solution, but it still comes down to one decision that everyone is stuck with. The free market is a million people driving in a million directions all at once. If there's anything interesting to be found, someone is going to find it, even if only by accident. The committee is a million people loaded into a single bus, all yanking on the steering wheel at once. Sure, the bus will probably go somewhere -- but it's doubtful that it's a direction that anyone actually wants it to go. If you want that bus to get somewhere specific and useful, you designate one person to be the driver and let him operate the bus; and you try to designate someone that actually has some idea how to drive a bus and get it somewhere that people might actually want to be. And that is centralized, authoritarian leadership. That's not to say that people don't get some say in which bus they ride, or that they can't have the driver replaced if necessary. But driving is definitely not a collaborative activity.
Decentralization abolishes both the committee AND the despot. Or rather, by allowing agents to operate independently, each agent can function as a despotism of one. You, making decisions for yourself, are the very antithesis of a committee. That's what I dig about decentralization, at least for those domains in which it works.
The big thing that Japan and Germany had going against them was that they were stuck with the authoritarian leaders that they had, leaders that were geared for waging the kind of blitzkrieg warfare that characterized the early portions of World War 2; the USA and the UK (and the USSR... sort of) appointed authoritarian military leaders that were primed for the kind of warfare that they were actually dealing with at that point. And of course, Germany and Japan had comparitively little industrial capacity compared to England, let alone the combined industrial capacity of the commonwealth or the unheard-of levels of industrial capacity of the USA. But none of that would have meant a thing without commanders that had the power to act relatively arbitrarily and autonymously. That's EXACTLY what happened in Vietnam, and EXACTLY what's happening in Iraq. The commanders can't do the things they need to, because they have ass-hats like Rumsfeld trying run the war as a public-relations exercise. All the industrial capacity and technological superiority in the world is meaningless without the kind of good strategy that comes from putting a small number of domain-experts in charge.
I actually started reading it once, but got distracted by the necessity of learning COM and ASP for work. If I could do it all again, I probably wouldn't have accepted a job in which knowing COM was considered anything other than a character flaw.
Exactly. It's a bit funny to think that the "democratic" and "capitalist" powers were operating as -- for all intents and purposes -- Communist dictatorships. It got results though; didn't America manage to field somewhere on the order of fifteen MILLION servicemen? That's greater than the population of most of the world's cities, and more than a few of the world's nations. Even Canada got about a million servicemen together, a remarkable feat for a nation of 25 million or so (although still less per-capita than Britain or some of the other commonwealth nations). But my God, 15 million. Even if only a fraction of them were ever sent overseas, it's a staggering number of people to trolly around. I doubt any contemporary government could manage anything like it. Canada had trouble evacuating just a few thousand people from Lebanon last year.
So they get 10,000 ideas submitted by ideas, and then we get more idiots to choose the best from among them? I take it you don't live in a democratic nation. Voting en-mass gives you results that are -- at best -- mildly horrible. At least when a small expert group makes a decision, you get the nice cleanly defined possibilities of -- at best -- awesome, paradigm-changing ideas, and -- at worst -- world-shatteringly stupid and evil. It's good to have such polarized outcomes, because it makes it easier to decide who will be up against the wall.
The Mythical Man Month, if I recall correctly, is a book. That would seem to be significantly LESS succinct than my garbled pseudo-paragraph. Unless of course you mean the phrase itself -- which actually makes a lot more sense and is the very epitome of brevity.
The dude got results, you can't argue with success. :)
The problem with Vietnam and Iraq is precisely the fact that they were run by committee. Congress got to periodically hamstring the war effort, senators got to earmark funds for projects that did nothing more than keep useless people employed, generals couldn't agree on how to wage the war and were going in a dozen directions at once. In Vietnam, the government couldn't even agree to have the goddam basic courage to admit that they were waging war and not a "police action". In Iraq, there isn't even any clear military leadership -- Bush is such a complete and utter retard that he puts civilian and corporate leaders in charge of a military effort and lets them completely ignore the actual military experts.
Your confusion stems from the fact that you assume that ANY handful of people will be equivalent. I'm talking about a handful of COMPETENT people.
How do you find the five best ideas in a hail of "advice" from 10,000 people? You can't -- it's molecules of gold in a river. Valuable in theory, completley worthless in practice, because it's unrecoverable.
The only thing democracies have going for them is that they can assign power to where it's most usefully employed -- small groups of experts that are close to the problem domain. Committees are only marginally better than small groups of idiots. Despotic governments routinely outperform democracies. That's the main reason that communist governments are so good at waging war. It's just that there's no way to ensure that despotic governments remain competent, or to replace them once they lose their way. That's the main reason that communist governments are so BAD at running their economies in the long-term. Democracies have the flexibility to go both ways -- to operate despotically when necessary, and to revert to the nice, safe, lowest-common-denominator shittiness of committee thinking the rest of the time.
It's interesting how in every modern war, the government that wins (assuming there is anything even vaguely like a winner) invariably puts a very small group of top military minds in charge of the war effort, even to the point of managing relevant aspects of the economy. Losers do just the opposite -- they let their legislature, congress, senate, president, chairman, corporate interests, beauracrats, and cronies make war decisions. And naturally, they either make retarded decisions or they rob the public blind at the expense of the war effort.
Comittee thinking is a disease. The bigger the comittee, the worse it gets. Human collaborative efficiency for creative works tops out at around 4 or 5 people. If you hope to invent new paradigms, you'll be hard-pressed to accomplish it with even as many a three people, and even two is pushing it.
One article does not make a new paradigm, but it's interesting nevertheless. Hopefully new experiments will generate data that confirms or denies the theory. But mindless dismissal of something because it challenges conventional ideas? That's precisely the kind of thing that holds science back, and leads to intellectual weaknesses like conservativism and jazz-appreciation.
Incidentally, the release of heat from chemical processes can be measured with extraordinary precision. Heat does not get "lost in the thermal noise". The very concept contradicts thermodynamics; any heat that is produced increases the level of thermal noise by definition. We're not talking about some quantum process that slips below the radar; cells are big, classical entities, and nerves are giants among cells.
Everyone loses because there is no incentive to upgrade infrastructure... as you would have realized if you had READ the WHOLE article.
Wouldn't reasonable people value both the quality AND the content of communication? It doesn't matter how perfectly Britney Spears enunciates (hypothetically) when she sings -- her songs are still moose-dribble. And Kurt Cobain may have had deeply profound lyrics, but hardly anyone would know because his singing was totally incomprehensible. The drooling mumbly guy at the psych hospital may be speaking deep truths, but how would you know? Karl Marx communicated and Ayn Rand both communicated their ideas extremely well (judging by the number of people that don't laugh out loud at the mere mention of them), but that doesn't make their ideas any less stupid and irrational.