The fair/unfair discussion misses an important point: young/old is not how managers think. I have a budget, and capex is distinct from operating expenses. Employees are operating expenses. In a public company, controlling how much of which kind of spending is done is important, but let's elide over that for the moment. So with that operating expense budget, I have to pay the people I need to do the job I need done, and my success is measured on getting the job done. I need a certain amount of productivity in a certain set of skills, and people aren't interchangeable cogs, so it's almost unheard of for an engineering team to have everyone on the team have every skill needed. (More power to you if you've got that, and can afford it.)
Within that limitation, there are two completely separate questions: what is it worth to me to retain the skill set of existing worker A, and what would I need to pay to get the skills possessed by candidate B. Those questions are not the least bit related. If A is an experienced, productive worker who consistently delivers and makes my life easy, I'm going to be willing to pay more to keep him. If I need skills that I don't have, and candidate B has them, I'm going to pay more to get those skills. Those two pay issues have to be balanced within the overall budget. Sometimes it makes sense to let an experienced engineer move on, and sometimes it makes sense to do whatever you have to to keep them. Sometimes new guys are worth a boatload of money, and sometimes they are worth little if anything in the context in which they are being hired.
If the experienced engineer is not getting what he thinks he deserves, then either he doesn't have the right skill mix, or he's not delivering consistently and well, or he is being taken advantage of. The first two are far more common than the last, because no manager can afford to lose resources (and have to hire and train replacements at great cost) if the person who is leaving is a positive for the team.
How do they make it their land? Or am I going to have to come back and ask why private property is such a bad thing? Why is speculation bad? Is it that speculation leads to development? Is it just because speculators can become rich if their speculations pay off?
Ah, yes, the problem with the world is too many people. I've never gotten that argument. If you really have a problem with people living, why not start solving the problem by taking care of yourself?
Some might say that there's a whole new planet waiting to support more humans, and the other life we have to bring along to make ours work, out there. You can stay behind and gripe.
No, actually not. It means that, in practice, browsers which do not support H.264 directly instead must support Flash, because that's how they will be served video, rather than through the HTML5 tag for it.
Yeah, and that dynamic plays out all over the place in tech. We keep reinventing things, giving them new names, and acting like we've changed the world. My favorite example: SOA. SOA is nothing more than port-based services all running on one port, and distinguishing themselves by publishing their identity over that same port (to specially crafted messages) rather than the port implying their identity, coupled with the idea of software reusability but without copying the code to whatever projects need it.
Actually, I think you would find that the position of the skeptics tends to be that a few dozen scientists are pretending to far more certainty than they really have, manipulating or ignoring data that doesn't fit their preconceived hypotheses, and using shaming and groupthink among academics to inflate their resultant crap into the presumed truth.
Frankly, I just have one (math) question for CAGW proponents: since when can you predict a chaotic, tightly-coupled, nonlinear system more than one iteration into the future within one sigma of reality?
Ah, yes, the term "fanboy" is always the key to knowing when to ignore a comment. Except when talking about Daniel Eran Dilger, of course, where the term is wholly justified.
In international affairs, I'd certainly say that the government's dealings can — indeed, must — entail shady backroom secret agreements. As President Polk said, "The experience of every nation on earth has demonstrated that emergencies may arise in which it becomes absolutely necessary for the public safety or the public good to make expenditures, the very subject of which would be defeated by publicity. In no nation is the application of such funds to be made public. In time of war or impending danger, the situation of the country will make it necessary to employ individuals for the purpose of obtaining information or rendering other important services who could never be prevailed upon to act if they entertained the least apprehension that their names or their agency would in any contingency be revealed." He also talked about things that are at the heart of the current release, including the giving of gifts to secure treaties and private negotiations with other powers. It is frankly the case that, in order for a government to be effective in international relations (not to mention espionage and military issues), it must keep secrets.
It's arguable (and I would certainly contend) that we keep too much secret. That is a different question from whether a government should keep anything at all secret. These releases are most certainly in the nature of things that a government should keep secret until they are of interest only to historians. In the wake of this release, it will be nearly impossible to get frank opinions and discussion of options with any of our allies or semi-friendly nations: they have too much to lose by being candid.
If that were so, then where are the leaks from China, from Germany, from Russia, etc? Or is it only US government transparency? That would be an odd agenda for a group of Europeans led by a South African Boer.
Back in the 1980s, when the Bradley IFV was just coming out, I saw a 60 Minutes piece on the vehicle. It complained that the Bradley had too high of a profile, making it vulnerable. It claimed that the Bradley was too cramped internally. Thus, it was both too big and too small. In a similar vein, it was too well armed and not well armed enough, and too well armored while not being armored enough. The real stupidity that is usually revealed by these "people are stupid" pieces is generally that of the writer of the piece.
I cannot see any indication that they have done anything to root out their own prejudgements and assumptions, or even to justify their inclusion. So like most politically-driven attempts at "science," this will doubtless just show the ideological conclusions reached by the creators of this tool (the tools behind the tool, if you will) before they even created it.
we wouldn't have to subsidize it. Private industry would build it, because it would be profitable to do so.
Of course, we live under a government that thinks that Atlas Shrugged was a book about railway management policy, so certainly money will get thrown at this. Gotta buy the votes somehow.
Given the choice, I would buy a phone/mp3 player/whatever without an FM tuner. Why should your choice be mandated for me? I have no desire to mandate my choice for you. That's what the market is for: serving everyone's choices, except maybe those at the very far fringe.
My understanding is that our debt is about to exceed our GDP, and that all of the income taxes East of the Mississippi (which is most of them) and a good bit West of the Mississippi are currently going to service the debt. Debt is growing much faster than GDP right now, and has been for years. At this rate, I think that we would have to get to an average 8% per year GDP growth sustained for years to get the debt-to-GDP ratio low enough to sustain Medicare and Medicaid perpetually. I just don't share your confidence that we can grow faster than our spending is growing. If we would dramatically rein in spending, I would change my opinion, but I simply don't see that happening, under either party, prior to the point where we have to default or hyper-inflate. The political will is simply not there.
Capitalism is based on the private ownership of capital, nothing more or less. It has nothing to do with the presence or absence of regulation.
Sorry, you are correct about the basis of capitalism. Let me reframe that statement closer to what I meant: capitalism is characterized by... and free markets are characterized by.... It's not the basis, but the outcome, that I was trying to point to.
Because in the end, property rights are nothing more and nothing less than the consequences of saying, "I own myself, and no one else does."
If all that one "owns" is one's self and one's labor, then no goods can be produced. The creation of goods requires raw materials. Materials are derived from land. Land is only turned into property by an act of government. Ergo, all claims of objects as property rest on government action.
One's relationship with oneself should never be described as "ownership". It cheapens and distorts the nature of human beings, and suggests that you could be separated from yourself, the way that any of us can be separated from property. If you "own" yourself, this introduces the idea that someone else could "own" you. No. Human beings are not ownable.
Property is an artificial creation meant to help ensure certain fundamental rights of privacy and self-determination. It is not in itself a basic right; when the misapplication of the concept of property becomes destructive of basic human rights, it is property that must yield.
All rights are, in a sense, social creations. After all, a putative man alone in the woods does not own a thing: he has what he has because he's willing to fight to keep it. The day he stops fighting the predators, he gets eaten. (Hyperbolic, to make a point in a slightly absurd manner, but I think it gets the point across.) A person alone in the woods needs no grant of rights to be able to speak his mind, to do what he wants, and so on. It is only in the presence of social groupings, and the possibility of conflicts, that such means of control become necessary.
When we join together into groups, we do so to increase our chance of survival, our prosperity, our freedom of action, our happiness. But that safety and freedom of action comes at a cost: as we get others to provide benefits to us (I'm too sick to hunt today, so give me some of your food), we have to provide benefits to others (you're to sick to hunt today, have some of my food). It's to the mutual benefit of all members of society to help each other. But inevitably this produces conflicts, because my short term gain in a particular situation may only be obtainable at long-term (or even short term) costs to another or to the society at large. So tribes (and countries, and social clubs, and any other human organization) come up with rules to ensure that the most people get the most benefit, and there are only four fundamental ways that such groups can guide or control their members into following those rules: rights, privileges, prohibitions and duties.
A duty is something you may be punished for not doing. A prohibition is something you may be punished for doing. A privilege is something that you would ordinarily be punished for doing or not doing, but for which another's action has immunized you from punishment. (For example, you can be punished for trespass, but not if the property owner has given you the privilege of being on the property.) A right is something you may not be punished for whether or not you do it. So yeah, rights are social constructs. And not just property rights: all rights.
Now, with that as background, I'll support my assertion that property rights are an extension of self-ownership. (By the way, I don't agree that it cheapens anything at all. Call it "sentience" or some other thing if you want; it comes down to the same thing in the end.) Self-ownership is inalienable: I cannot stop being myself any more than I can stop taking up space, or existing in time
So, are you making the case that this will continue indefinitely, and that the bills will never come due? If so, I have a credit default swap to sell you.
Except that free markets don't encourage the growth of powerful companies. It takes a regulated market to do that. Consider the state of GM if the government hadn't bailed them out: they'd be bankrupt. And if the government hadn't regulated auto imports and labor rates and many other things, GM would have been bankrupt in the 1980s. It is government action that keeps large companies operating; otherwise they tend to quickly spin out of control due to their own hubris or simply being too large to actively manage. The power of large companies in a truly free market is temporally limited by competition and inability to react to changing conditions. The government's power to stifle competition and artificially freeze conditions (subsidies and restrictive trade rules) is what allows large companies to persist long enough to become bad for society.
Slashdot Mirror
The fair/unfair discussion misses an important point: young/old is not how managers think. I have a budget, and capex is distinct from operating expenses. Employees are operating expenses. In a public company, controlling how much of which kind of spending is done is important, but let's elide over that for the moment. So with that operating expense budget, I have to pay the people I need to do the job I need done, and my success is measured on getting the job done. I need a certain amount of productivity in a certain set of skills, and people aren't interchangeable cogs, so it's almost unheard of for an engineering team to have everyone on the team have every skill needed. (More power to you if you've got that, and can afford it.)
Within that limitation, there are two completely separate questions: what is it worth to me to retain the skill set of existing worker A, and what would I need to pay to get the skills possessed by candidate B. Those questions are not the least bit related. If A is an experienced, productive worker who consistently delivers and makes my life easy, I'm going to be willing to pay more to keep him. If I need skills that I don't have, and candidate B has them, I'm going to pay more to get those skills. Those two pay issues have to be balanced within the overall budget. Sometimes it makes sense to let an experienced engineer move on, and sometimes it makes sense to do whatever you have to to keep them. Sometimes new guys are worth a boatload of money, and sometimes they are worth little if anything in the context in which they are being hired.
If the experienced engineer is not getting what he thinks he deserves, then either he doesn't have the right skill mix, or he's not delivering consistently and well, or he is being taken advantage of. The first two are far more common than the last, because no manager can afford to lose resources (and have to hire and train replacements at great cost) if the person who is leaving is a positive for the team.
How do they make it their land? Or am I going to have to come back and ask why private property is such a bad thing? Why is speculation bad? Is it that speculation leads to development? Is it just because speculators can become rich if their speculations pay off?
But why not? What gives you the right to decide how they use that land? What is the basis of your claim?
Ah, yes, the problem with the world is too many people. I've never gotten that argument. If you really have a problem with people living, why not start solving the problem by taking care of yourself?
Why? Why don't those who get there get to use the land how they choose?
If private property is such a problem for you, perhaps I can have yours?
Some might say that there's a whole new planet waiting to support more humans, and the other life we have to bring along to make ours work, out there. You can stay behind and gripe.
No, actually not. It means that, in practice, browsers which do not support H.264 directly instead must support Flash, because that's how they will be served video, rather than through the HTML5 tag for it.
Yeah, and that dynamic plays out all over the place in tech. We keep reinventing things, giving them new names, and acting like we've changed the world. My favorite example: SOA. SOA is nothing more than port-based services all running on one port, and distinguishing themselves by publishing their identity over that same port (to specially crafted messages) rather than the port implying their identity, coupled with the idea of software reusability but without copying the code to whatever projects need it.
My name is Jean Valjean. - 24601
Actually, I think you would find that the position of the skeptics tends to be that a few dozen scientists are pretending to far more certainty than they really have, manipulating or ignoring data that doesn't fit their preconceived hypotheses, and using shaming and groupthink among academics to inflate their resultant crap into the presumed truth.
Frankly, I just have one (math) question for CAGW proponents: since when can you predict a chaotic, tightly-coupled, nonlinear system more than one iteration into the future within one sigma of reality?
Which of course explains why there are so many commercial applications available for Linux. Thanks for pointing that out.
Ah, yes, the term "fanboy" is always the key to knowing when to ignore a comment. Except when talking about Daniel Eran Dilger, of course, where the term is wholly justified.
In international affairs, I'd certainly say that the government's dealings can — indeed, must — entail shady backroom secret agreements. As President Polk said, "The experience of every nation on earth has demonstrated that emergencies may arise in which it becomes absolutely necessary for the public safety or the public good to make expenditures, the very subject of which would be defeated by publicity. In no nation is the application of such funds to be made public. In time of war or impending danger, the situation of the country will make it necessary to employ individuals for the purpose of obtaining information or rendering other important services who could never be prevailed upon to act if they entertained the least apprehension that their names or their agency would in any contingency be revealed." He also talked about things that are at the heart of the current release, including the giving of gifts to secure treaties and private negotiations with other powers. It is frankly the case that, in order for a government to be effective in international relations (not to mention espionage and military issues), it must keep secrets.
It's arguable (and I would certainly contend) that we keep too much secret. That is a different question from whether a government should keep anything at all secret. These releases are most certainly in the nature of things that a government should keep secret until they are of interest only to historians. In the wake of this release, it will be nearly impossible to get frank opinions and discussion of options with any of our allies or semi-friendly nations: they have too much to lose by being candid.
If that were so, then where are the leaks from China, from Germany, from Russia, etc? Or is it only US government transparency? That would be an odd agenda for a group of Europeans led by a South African Boer.
Oh, I didn't realize a criminal record was still required before going to Australia.
Back in the 1980s, when the Bradley IFV was just coming out, I saw a 60 Minutes piece on the vehicle. It complained that the Bradley had too high of a profile, making it vulnerable. It claimed that the Bradley was too cramped internally. Thus, it was both too big and too small. In a similar vein, it was too well armed and not well armed enough, and too well armored while not being armored enough. The real stupidity that is usually revealed by these "people are stupid" pieces is generally that of the writer of the piece.
I cannot see any indication that they have done anything to root out their own prejudgements and assumptions, or even to justify their inclusion. So like most politically-driven attempts at "science," this will doubtless just show the ideological conclusions reached by the creators of this tool (the tools behind the tool, if you will) before they even created it.
we wouldn't have to subsidize it. Private industry would build it, because it would be profitable to do so.
Of course, we live under a government that thinks that Atlas Shrugged was a book about railway management policy, so certainly money will get thrown at this. Gotta buy the votes somehow.
I'm so sorry for you.
Given the choice, I would buy a phone/mp3 player/whatever without an FM tuner. Why should your choice be mandated for me? I have no desire to mandate my choice for you. That's what the market is for: serving everyone's choices, except maybe those at the very far fringe.
My understanding is that our debt is about to exceed our GDP, and that all of the income taxes East of the Mississippi (which is most of them) and a good bit West of the Mississippi are currently going to service the debt. Debt is growing much faster than GDP right now, and has been for years. At this rate, I think that we would have to get to an average 8% per year GDP growth sustained for years to get the debt-to-GDP ratio low enough to sustain Medicare and Medicaid perpetually. I just don't share your confidence that we can grow faster than our spending is growing. If we would dramatically rein in spending, I would change my opinion, but I simply don't see that happening, under either party, prior to the point where we have to default or hyper-inflate. The political will is simply not there.
Capitalism is based on the private ownership of capital, nothing more or less. It has nothing to do with the presence or absence of regulation.
Sorry, you are correct about the basis of capitalism. Let me reframe that statement closer to what I meant: capitalism is characterized by... and free markets are characterized by.... It's not the basis, but the outcome, that I was trying to point to.
If all that one "owns" is one's self and one's labor, then no goods can be produced. The creation of goods requires raw materials. Materials are derived from land. Land is only turned into property by an act of government. Ergo, all claims of objects as property rest on government action.
One's relationship with oneself should never be described as "ownership". It cheapens and distorts the nature of human beings, and suggests that you could be separated from yourself, the way that any of us can be separated from property. If you "own" yourself, this introduces the idea that someone else could "own" you. No. Human beings are not ownable.
Property is an artificial creation meant to help ensure certain fundamental rights of privacy and self-determination. It is not in itself a basic right; when the misapplication of the concept of property becomes destructive of basic human rights, it is property that must yield.
All rights are, in a sense, social creations. After all, a putative man alone in the woods does not own a thing: he has what he has because he's willing to fight to keep it. The day he stops fighting the predators, he gets eaten. (Hyperbolic, to make a point in a slightly absurd manner, but I think it gets the point across.) A person alone in the woods needs no grant of rights to be able to speak his mind, to do what he wants, and so on. It is only in the presence of social groupings, and the possibility of conflicts, that such means of control become necessary.
When we join together into groups, we do so to increase our chance of survival, our prosperity, our freedom of action, our happiness. But that safety and freedom of action comes at a cost: as we get others to provide benefits to us (I'm too sick to hunt today, so give me some of your food), we have to provide benefits to others (you're to sick to hunt today, have some of my food). It's to the mutual benefit of all members of society to help each other. But inevitably this produces conflicts, because my short term gain in a particular situation may only be obtainable at long-term (or even short term) costs to another or to the society at large. So tribes (and countries, and social clubs, and any other human organization) come up with rules to ensure that the most people get the most benefit, and there are only four fundamental ways that such groups can guide or control their members into following those rules: rights, privileges, prohibitions and duties.
A duty is something you may be punished for not doing. A prohibition is something you may be punished for doing. A privilege is something that you would ordinarily be punished for doing or not doing, but for which another's action has immunized you from punishment. (For example, you can be punished for trespass, but not if the property owner has given you the privilege of being on the property.) A right is something you may not be punished for whether or not you do it. So yeah, rights are social constructs. And not just property rights: all rights.
Now, with that as background, I'll support my assertion that property rights are an extension of self-ownership. (By the way, I don't agree that it cheapens anything at all. Call it "sentience" or some other thing if you want; it comes down to the same thing in the end.) Self-ownership is inalienable: I cannot stop being myself any more than I can stop taking up space, or existing in time
So, are you making the case that this will continue indefinitely, and that the bills will never come due? If so, I have a credit default swap to sell you.
Except that free markets don't encourage the growth of powerful companies. It takes a regulated market to do that. Consider the state of GM if the government hadn't bailed them out: they'd be bankrupt. And if the government hadn't regulated auto imports and labor rates and many other things, GM would have been bankrupt in the 1980s. It is government action that keeps large companies operating; otherwise they tend to quickly spin out of control due to their own hubris or simply being too large to actively manage. The power of large companies in a truly free market is temporally limited by competition and inability to react to changing conditions. The government's power to stifle competition and artificially freeze conditions (subsidies and restrictive trade rules) is what allows large companies to persist long enough to become bad for society.