I'm certainly more skeptical of people who want us to spend trillions of dollars and remake our political institutions because of their theories, than I am of people whose theories cause them to say, "Huh. That's odd."
"Fanboy" is more accurately a term that indicates the user is not worth reading/listening to, because they think snide contempt is impressive to others. It's the/. equivalent of posting to USENET from aol.com.
I am pretty optimistic about Apple, though, in the immediate post-Jobs era. The reason is because Jobs didn't just drive the development of great products; he also developed great people. The entire top leadership of Apple, not least Tim Cook who will replace him, follows and contributes to Jobs' philosophy on product design, markets to jump into, how to use the company's resources to secure strategic future technologies, when and why to kill your baby. In other words, it's at least a good 5 or 10 years before Apple's management culture starts to change significantly, meaning that Apple will continue to drive in the direction they've been going since Jobs came back in the late 1990s. As someone who really likes that direction, towards a simplified and thus more broadly useful application of technology, that makes me content.
This is functionally equivalent to saying: "Apple is making things better for what it controls, but not better for what it does not control, and therefore they are horrible and I won't use their stuff." There are good reasons not to use Apple's stuff. This isn't one of them.
True. I don't know if the mobile chat service is going to use XMPP though. If it does, yay. If not, well, back to my comment about interoperable protocols.
Cellular data service. On an iPhone (and IIRC, on Android as well), that is the last fallback measure for data. On iPhones, it's a little open circle where you would normally see a 3G or E (for EDGE). Slow, but it works, and for small messages like SMS, it should be fine.
I'm all for it, but only if I get to pick who's exterminated. I suspect you're all for it only because you set a condition that you think excludes yourself and those you care about.
Since Apple is introducing technology in iOS 5 for an SMS-like service among all iPhones and other iOS devices (and iChat, too, IIRC), AT&T's SMS revenue is about to plummet. And that's one of the easiest ways AT&T has to up the dollars per customer metric. (How many people use tethering? Probably very few.) So AT&T sees this, no doubt, as a way to keep their SMS revenues up. Everyone else will see it as a reason to dump SMS altogether and use an IP-based rather than cell-based messaging service. Now if only Apple and Google could agree on interoperable protocols for stuff like this....
Loved your post, phlogiston being a topic I studied in history of science, but your sig needs work. Not only is "whom" still a useful word, but the phrase is "intents and purposes," not "intensive purposes." Gah! An now I'm correcting language on the Internet!
As far as entirely free markets, they have existed, but are rare. Some regulation of markets is usually needed, at least to the extent necessary to provide remedies for fraud and prevention of compulsion. So for example, MMORPG operators eventually generally step in to control what start out as free markets within their games, because otherwise real-world fraud is a frequent problem. But there is a difference between a market which is lightly regulated (the norm in the US before the 1890s), a market which is heavily regulated (the norm in the US since the 1930s), and a market which is government controlled. The US has been moving more and more towards indirect government control of production and distribution, which is the differentia for fascist economics (from communism, where control is direct; and socialism, where control is generally indirect on production and direct on distribution).
I think you misunderstand monopolies. A monopoly cannot persist in a relatively free market. It can form, but it gets undercut by competitors or alternatives, because money, like water, seeks a lower level where it can. Where monopolies persist, it is because of direct government support or because of massive regulation that raises the cost of entry of competitors. While governments can end monopolies faster than they would in a truly free market (by breaking them up deliberately), it is far more common for governments to sustain monopolies, because it's easier for bureaucrats to deal with a small number of large entities than a large number of small entities, and because politicians can get more leverage out of graft involving large organizations than small ones.
There is certainly a reason for having regulation. What I question is the amount of regulation which we now have, which has reach truly stupendous proportions. If you doubt it, go read a corporate tax form, or a corporate compliance filing, or the SarbOx or HIPAA laws, or any part of the Federal Register.
That's because it's not a free market, but a government regulated market. Technically, the US economy has been moving more and more towards fascism (government picks winners and losers and closely controls activity, but doesn't directly own the assets) since the 1930's. Free markets have been increasingly hard to find, especially since the late 1980's, in the US.
I think you would be well served by checking out exactly how much money the government is spending, and on what. There is a need for some level of government, but what we have now is unsustainable. We will simply run out of money, no matter how we tax. (And remember, higher levels of taxation lead to lower levels of economic growth, and thus lower revenue generated to the government.) So really, I'm not opposed to some new taxation, but we'd be far better off by dramatically cutting spending and, especially, cutting the regulatory burden that makes high economic growth rates impossible.
Actually, it's the other way around. If there's less money available to be handed out to political allies and cronies or to buy votes, the amount of graft and corruption generally goes down. The layers of overhead and oversight and management generally do not serve to reduce graft and corruption, despite the best of intententions, but they do increase cost by orders of magnitude. I've been working with the Federal government for years as a contractor, and I assure you that there is no way in which managers abusing their own power, or secret deals being made, or mistakes being made, or innovation being promoted could possibly be attributed to the government. Quite the opposite, in fact.
This is an utterly stupid argument. Some level of government is necessary for collective action. The small government argument is not that there should be no central government, or that society should be so fractured that each faction has its own government and laws and otherwise lives in a state of nature with the other factions. Instead, the small government argument is that our government does too much, and has so extended its authority as to be destructive of its primary end of protecting our rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Your strawman is frequently-repeated, and utterly inane.
If GUIs cannot be designed yet that are good at complex tasks, then how is that different from saying that GUIs are not good at very complex configurations? The statements are functionally equivalent, like the saying that someone who won't read a book has no advantage over someone who can't read a book. Either way, the book didn't get read. If we have the ability to create good administration interfaces for complex systems with a command line, and not a GUI, then why is that an advantage for the GUI?
Don't get me wrong: I love GUIs for user interaction with systems. They're just not that good for the configuration of the systems themselves, in most cases.
I don't disagree in general. I would absolutely, by the way, be fine with dividing out the electoral votes in every state by congressional district, with the popular vote winner across the whole state getting the 2 electors corresponding to the Senators. I think first past the post is a horrible way to run an election, despite the advantage of being easy to explain, and that's why I said that proportional voting in the House would be reasonable and useful. The idea of what I was proposing was to get as many different ways of choosing elected representatives as possible, to significantly increase the difficulty of holding together a cohesive faction (of which political parties are only one example) that could capture a majority of all branches of government simultaneously. Regional representation was the original plan for doing that, but the combination of first past the post and the nationalization of elections and the way we set up congressional districts have all conspired to destroy that limitation on factional power in the US.
Well, mathematically, an electoral college system actually maximizes the power of the individual voter. (There is more chance that a change in one vote will flip the smaller group, and that the magnified power of the smaller group will flip the bigger group, than that the entire electorate is only one vote apart.) I do think that proportional representation would be better for the House, but I would remove the Senate from electoral considerations altogether. Or maybe instead have three Senators per State, one elected by majority, one appointed by the governor or the legislature, and one selected at random from the jury pool.
But then, I suspect my desires are different from yours. My goal is the establishment of a more solid republic, to combat majoritarian tendencies, while I suspect that your goal would be a more majoritarian system, given your statement.
Slower, probably. But the problem is that server applications are generally very configurable, and GUIs are not good at very complex configurations. As a result, it's not uncommon for configuration GUIs to be terrible at handling the complexity generally available to server apps. You could make a good argument that this means that server apps should be made less complex/less configurable, but I've never seen a good argument that GUIs are better for configuring complex server apps. Lower learning curve, sure. But far, far less flexible.
Actually, I don't know why you'd want to use the admin tools anyway for app configuration, service monitoring and the like. They've always been terrible tools, mainly in that they are very inflexible, unless you're doing vanilla admin work. Anything unusual and you're back to the app config files anyway. And since the Apple-supplied versions of the server apps are open source, but generally out of date, you're usually better off with Mac Ports and command line based administration. The exception is generally user permissions through the directory, where most of the time it's easier to use the GUI. But for the services side of things, I wouldn't bother with Apple's tools.
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I'm certainly more skeptical of people who want us to spend trillions of dollars and remake our political institutions because of their theories, than I am of people whose theories cause them to say, "Huh. That's odd."
"Fanboy" is more accurately a term that indicates the user is not worth reading/listening to, because they think snide contempt is impressive to others. It's the /. equivalent of posting to USENET from aol.com.
I am pretty optimistic about Apple, though, in the immediate post-Jobs era. The reason is because Jobs didn't just drive the development of great products; he also developed great people. The entire top leadership of Apple, not least Tim Cook who will replace him, follows and contributes to Jobs' philosophy on product design, markets to jump into, how to use the company's resources to secure strategic future technologies, when and why to kill your baby. In other words, it's at least a good 5 or 10 years before Apple's management culture starts to change significantly, meaning that Apple will continue to drive in the direction they've been going since Jobs came back in the late 1990s. As someone who really likes that direction, towards a simplified and thus more broadly useful application of technology, that makes me content.
This is functionally equivalent to saying: "Apple is making things better for what it controls, but not better for what it does not control, and therefore they are horrible and I won't use their stuff." There are good reasons not to use Apple's stuff. This isn't one of them.
True. I don't know if the mobile chat service is going to use XMPP though. If it does, yay. If not, well, back to my comment about interoperable protocols.
Cellular data service. On an iPhone (and IIRC, on Android as well), that is the last fallback measure for data. On iPhones, it's a little open circle where you would normally see a 3G or E (for EDGE). Slow, but it works, and for small messages like SMS, it should be fine.
I'm all for it, but only if I get to pick who's exterminated. I suspect you're all for it only because you set a condition that you think excludes yourself and those you care about.
Oh! Now I get what this administration is doing!
I'm not sure that I agree, but this is the first useful argument I've ever seen in favor of farm subsidies, and definitely one I'll consider closely.
Since Apple is introducing technology in iOS 5 for an SMS-like service among all iPhones and other iOS devices (and iChat, too, IIRC), AT&T's SMS revenue is about to plummet. And that's one of the easiest ways AT&T has to up the dollars per customer metric. (How many people use tethering? Probably very few.) So AT&T sees this, no doubt, as a way to keep their SMS revenues up. Everyone else will see it as a reason to dump SMS altogether and use an IP-based rather than cell-based messaging service. Now if only Apple and Google could agree on interoperable protocols for stuff like this....
The perfect storm of magical thinking and self hatred.
Loved your post, phlogiston being a topic I studied in history of science, but your sig needs work. Not only is "whom" still a useful word, but the phrase is "intents and purposes," not "intensive purposes." Gah! An now I'm correcting language on the Internet!
I did look up the definition, some time ago, of fascist economics. For a non-technical, close enough, look, read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_fascism
As far as entirely free markets, they have existed, but are rare. Some regulation of markets is usually needed, at least to the extent necessary to provide remedies for fraud and prevention of compulsion. So for example, MMORPG operators eventually generally step in to control what start out as free markets within their games, because otherwise real-world fraud is a frequent problem. But there is a difference between a market which is lightly regulated (the norm in the US before the 1890s), a market which is heavily regulated (the norm in the US since the 1930s), and a market which is government controlled. The US has been moving more and more towards indirect government control of production and distribution, which is the differentia for fascist economics (from communism, where control is direct; and socialism, where control is generally indirect on production and direct on distribution).
I think you misunderstand monopolies. A monopoly cannot persist in a relatively free market. It can form, but it gets undercut by competitors or alternatives, because money, like water, seeks a lower level where it can. Where monopolies persist, it is because of direct government support or because of massive regulation that raises the cost of entry of competitors. While governments can end monopolies faster than they would in a truly free market (by breaking them up deliberately), it is far more common for governments to sustain monopolies, because it's easier for bureaucrats to deal with a small number of large entities than a large number of small entities, and because politicians can get more leverage out of graft involving large organizations than small ones.
There is certainly a reason for having regulation. What I question is the amount of regulation which we now have, which has reach truly stupendous proportions. If you doubt it, go read a corporate tax form, or a corporate compliance filing, or the SarbOx or HIPAA laws, or any part of the Federal Register.
Verizon FIOS (residential, at least) redirects to Paxfire on mistyped domains.
That's because it's not a free market, but a government regulated market. Technically, the US economy has been moving more and more towards fascism (government picks winners and losers and closely controls activity, but doesn't directly own the assets) since the 1930's. Free markets have been increasingly hard to find, especially since the late 1980's, in the US.
Really? If the government doesn't specify how many gallons per flush our toilets have, we face disaster? I think not.
I think you would be well served by checking out exactly how much money the government is spending, and on what. There is a need for some level of government, but what we have now is unsustainable. We will simply run out of money, no matter how we tax. (And remember, higher levels of taxation lead to lower levels of economic growth, and thus lower revenue generated to the government.) So really, I'm not opposed to some new taxation, but we'd be far better off by dramatically cutting spending and, especially, cutting the regulatory burden that makes high economic growth rates impossible.
Actually, it's the other way around. If there's less money available to be handed out to political allies and cronies or to buy votes, the amount of graft and corruption generally goes down. The layers of overhead and oversight and management generally do not serve to reduce graft and corruption, despite the best of intententions, but they do increase cost by orders of magnitude. I've been working with the Federal government for years as a contractor, and I assure you that there is no way in which managers abusing their own power, or secret deals being made, or mistakes being made, or innovation being promoted could possibly be attributed to the government. Quite the opposite, in fact.
This is an utterly stupid argument. Some level of government is necessary for collective action. The small government argument is not that there should be no central government, or that society should be so fractured that each faction has its own government and laws and otherwise lives in a state of nature with the other factions. Instead, the small government argument is that our government does too much, and has so extended its authority as to be destructive of its primary end of protecting our rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Your strawman is frequently-repeated, and utterly inane.
If GUIs cannot be designed yet that are good at complex tasks, then how is that different from saying that GUIs are not good at very complex configurations? The statements are functionally equivalent, like the saying that someone who won't read a book has no advantage over someone who can't read a book. Either way, the book didn't get read. If we have the ability to create good administration interfaces for complex systems with a command line, and not a GUI, then why is that an advantage for the GUI?
Don't get me wrong: I love GUIs for user interaction with systems. They're just not that good for the configuration of the systems themselves, in most cases.
I don't disagree in general. I would absolutely, by the way, be fine with dividing out the electoral votes in every state by congressional district, with the popular vote winner across the whole state getting the 2 electors corresponding to the Senators. I think first past the post is a horrible way to run an election, despite the advantage of being easy to explain, and that's why I said that proportional voting in the House would be reasonable and useful. The idea of what I was proposing was to get as many different ways of choosing elected representatives as possible, to significantly increase the difficulty of holding together a cohesive faction (of which political parties are only one example) that could capture a majority of all branches of government simultaneously. Regional representation was the original plan for doing that, but the combination of first past the post and the nationalization of elections and the way we set up congressional districts have all conspired to destroy that limitation on factional power in the US.
Well, mathematically, an electoral college system actually maximizes the power of the individual voter. (There is more chance that a change in one vote will flip the smaller group, and that the magnified power of the smaller group will flip the bigger group, than that the entire electorate is only one vote apart.) I do think that proportional representation would be better for the House, but I would remove the Senate from electoral considerations altogether. Or maybe instead have three Senators per State, one elected by majority, one appointed by the governor or the legislature, and one selected at random from the jury pool.
But then, I suspect my desires are different from yours. My goal is the establishment of a more solid republic, to combat majoritarian tendencies, while I suspect that your goal would be a more majoritarian system, given your statement.
Yes, but you'll have to do some work first.
Slower, probably. But the problem is that server applications are generally very configurable, and GUIs are not good at very complex configurations. As a result, it's not uncommon for configuration GUIs to be terrible at handling the complexity generally available to server apps. You could make a good argument that this means that server apps should be made less complex/less configurable, but I've never seen a good argument that GUIs are better for configuring complex server apps. Lower learning curve, sure. But far, far less flexible.
Actually, I don't know why you'd want to use the admin tools anyway for app configuration, service monitoring and the like. They've always been terrible tools, mainly in that they are very inflexible, unless you're doing vanilla admin work. Anything unusual and you're back to the app config files anyway. And since the Apple-supplied versions of the server apps are open source, but generally out of date, you're usually better off with Mac Ports and command line based administration. The exception is generally user permissions through the directory, where most of the time it's easier to use the GUI. But for the services side of things, I wouldn't bother with Apple's tools.