This is a case where I wish I hadn't RTFA. None of these glib aphorisms turn full circle. It scares me that he's willing to throw out dangerous sound-bites with no guard rails for the unwary.
I think he also has a bad case of bafflegab envy: where your investors decide your company is worth twice as much because everything you say runs against common sense. We've had a few investment cycles where all the money was chasing after anti-gravity machines.
No doubt you can dress funny on the road to success if you're funded to twice the level that any rational person would pony into. This is the "Confederacy of Dunces" business model. Works great if you can pull it off.
You're touching on a lot of things I agree with, and topics I'm sure I've covered in many previous comments, not that I could find such a post among all the chaff I generate on a regular basis.
Rehabilitation is way out of fashion, right beside "more taxes" in the Tea Room of partitioned prosperity. The modern fashion is to vote people off the island. America was founded on the ideal (so I believe) of being less class-bound than the UK and more fiscally mobile than the rest of Europe. Just like Quebec, where French changes less than in France, America has returned to what they once rejected and becomes ever more desperate to establish a permanent scarlet-letter underclass; the housing boom in the penal system continues unabated by the financial crisis.
It's funny this topic comes up on the same day as the "do dumb things" admonition from a Google exec. I post under pseudonyms precisely for this reason: it encourages me to push the envelope in what I express. Sometimes I'm rude, but usually briefly, and typically in response to people posting way under their intellectual punching weight (because that takes work and it might impair erectile function to divert the blood flow to Woody's second favorite organ).
Also, I have no desire to see a response on another forum "but you made a stupid post on Slashdot saying exactly the opposite!" Yeah, maybe I did, and maybe you had to be there.
If I were a complete turd, I suppose I would someday run out of karma, and my posts would begin life among the rabble on 'B' Ark. This hasn't happened anywhere I post so far as I've noticed.
Vonnegut, as usual, was prophetic in this matter. From Cat's Cradle as cribbed by Back Words Indexing which perhaps quoted more than they should have, though I concur with the temptation.
I showed this index entry to the Mintons, asking them if it didn't think it was an enchanting biography in itself, a biography of a reluctant goddess of love. I got an unexpectedly expert answer, as one does in life sometimes. It appeared that Claire Minton, in her time, had been a professional indexer. I had never heard of such a profession before... She said that indexing was a thing only the most amateurish author undertook to do for his own book. I asked her what she thought of Philip Castle's job.
"Flattering to the author, insulting to the reader," she said. "In a hyphenated word," she said with the shrewd amiability of an expert, "self-indulgent. I'm always embarrassed when I see an index an author has made of his own work. It's a revealing thing...a shameless exhibition... He's obviously in love with this Mona Aamons Monzano... He has mixed feelings about his father... He's insecure... He'll never marry her... I've said all I'm going to say," she said...
I think I'll pass on immolating myself into the great index in the public Google+ planetarium of everything I've ever been.
That's a great post, of the kind that saves me a lot of typing. You covered the first-order considerations brilliantly.
What you missed was technical debt blindness, which has been around since forever. Books I read around the time of the Mythical Man Month talked a lot about maintenance syndrome: that the original development team would be regarded as brilliant for producing working functionality at tremendous speed (undocumented, with no error handling for edge cases), then the first maintenance team would all be fired as underachievers for adding hardly any new functionality in the first year or two.
Turns out it's hard to erect a machine shop over top of adobe mud brick construction without adding some reinforcement to the structure, which usually takes a lot longer than the entire original edifice.
You can instead take a wrecking ball to the first iteration, but this rarely works out as well as hoped. You end up with far more ambitious adobe mud construction built with a whole new generation of unproven tools. At some point you have to bite the bullet and ferment what you began with.
People hide debt blindness behind widely divergent construals of simplicity, where "simple" usually turns out to be a euphemism for any decision that sidesteps paying down debt in the short term.
For professional software engineers, there is one true simplicity to rule them all: generativity and compositionality. Can you build the next layer on top with any hope of having it work and able to support an ongoing stack? For us, it's a long term game of pass the baton. For everyone else (management, scientists) the endgame is to cash out, and take credit elsewhere (e.g. publication biography).
Unfortunately, a citation is not a formal linkage that the compiler either accepts or rejects. By the standards of compositionality, citation is payment in dubious coin. Citation is not falsifiable. Scientists still count their citations even when they come from papers that are full of crap, peer review notwithstanding. For a professional software engineer, when you start instantiating objects from one library inside an abstract expression template library, you come face to face with compositionality in a way that few scientists can even imagine, having weened at the outrage of being improperly cited.
Technical debt blindness on the part of management quickly turns a software engineering shop into a highly non-linear fiasco. We've all seen this.
Somehow this game works out better (for the participants) when played by bankers with leverage debt. But now it's my turn to pass the baton, since that deserves a whole lot more typing and I've done my bit.
Since Google knows full well that they intend to enforce their TOS terms with automated scripts that will certainly have some residual false positive rate no matter how much they burnish and buff, and they never intend to provide manpower to handle all of the complaints (which potentially includes every account they lock out for legitimate reasons) they need to take a more moderate view on the terms of suspension.
One of the consequences is that you lose access to your own personal information. Google should certainly provide a mechanism for a locked-out user to retrieve a copy of their email and calendar as of the time of lock-out.
An automated system with no human appeal mechanism should not be flirting with disenfranchisement.
Under different aliases I've leaked enough information to have various identities joined together, but I comfort myself with the naive pretense that since I've kept these identities separate and *not* directly identified myself in any way, that this was a choice consciously made that ought to be respected by Data Galore.
I do a lot of searches on Google because certain patterns of letters amuse me: I like to make up obscure code names for little projects with multiple puns embedded. I do a lot of serious search. And I do a lot of peripheral search because I read something and I go "I can't believe (a) some guy said that or (b) what some guy said".
This presents some problems for the people who believe that what you search is what you are. My search background is probably pushing into the 100,000 territory. On a rampage, I've done 1000 searches per day.
If you listed out the 100 strangest things I've searched for over the last decade, by the standards of someone who might have only made a few hundred searches in their life (all of which returned prebuilt search results), such a person might think I'm the next unibomber in training. I spent half a day once reading about Hafnium nuclear isomers. What well-mannered person would be poking his nose around in something like that? I also spent half a day once going pretty far down the JFK conspiracy-theory rabbit hole. I emerged unscathed, but you'd never know if from my search history.
The notion that you are what you search for can only lead to the worst forms of thought control. Especially if you are also *any chosen subset* of same. Subsetting is, of course, a time-honoured tradition for wielding the scarlet letter. Just ask Michael Moore or Oliver Stone.
"Are you now or have you ever been a searcher of names of radical apparatchiks?" Yes, your honour, including "Ayn Rand" and "CIA Bush cocaine", "Cardinal Ratzinger", and "Soros conspiracy". Or were you meaning to exclude the searches conducted while I was singing to myself "lulululu lulululu" to the theme of Twilight Zone? It appears my search history begs for a soundtrack.
In some forums more than others I push the envelope on conventional norms, or dial sarcasm up so high, I'm not sure myself by the time I'm done what I've lampooned. Some times I try to pull off a trick shot. Sometimes I try and fail.
If you asked me, "what exactly did you mean by such and such a twisted circumlocution reeking [on the surface] of antisemitism?" in many cases I'd be as stumped as my interlocutor and I'd have to resort to my baseline attitude "I was probably trying to say that racist people suck shrouded in a garden-path pretense of saying the opposite".
Here's the thing. People won't think unless they identify you as one of their own. If you can get the thinking and the identifying far enough out of sync, you might occasionally manage to put over a forbidden concept into a walled mental garden. (With about the same shooting odds as dropping a field goal from mid court; it's a bad shot, but cool when it drops.)
In other cases, the lynch pin of my diatribe might come back to me; if it comes back to me, there's no guarantee it makes sense or that what I set out to accomplish actually worked; and even if I'm pleased with the verbal device in retrospect, I'd need a ouija board connection to Douglas Adams with his phantasmal head stuffed into a seer-stone hat to help me translate the layers of backspin to the average dipshit who believes in a) ouija boards or b) seer stones.
Count my vote for "you are what you search" or "you are what your pseudonyms spout" as the WORST. IDEAS. EVER. I'm not keen on signing up to a social networking Stonehenge, because I just don't hew to the self-identity police. At the same time, I consider myself hardcore about authenticity in everything I write, under any guise. Authenticity, however, is a slippery concept since humans are emotional creatures. Authenticity of the moment
the listener just wants to be able to hear everything without having to fiddle with the volume every few seconds
Ah yes, nothing sells like the unslakable demand to not be inconvenienced by your own stupidity. Many of these same people just want to get drunk without being inconvenienced by flavour. Excess compression is the musical equivalent of macro-brew alcohol.
Last night I went to a new micro-brew down the street which was pretty good. The bitter and IPA were excellent. The Summer Ale wasn't quite right. I asked the bartender for a lime, and then it was pretty good. Some of DO want to play with the dials.
Since I don't believe in god, playing with the dials is pretty much what I live for.
There's a connection here to rational ignorance. Rational ignorance is when you don't bother to understand and complain about the sugar quota, because it's only costing you a few dollars per year, whereas informing yourself and complaining about it would cost a lot more.
It's the old point about the law that governs Washington is the law that concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. That's why we have sugar quotas; 308 million Americans eat sugar; a few thousand Americans grow sugar. We have sugar quotas. Why? Concentrated benefits, dispersed costs. Probably told this story on EconTalk before, but when I mentioned my distress over that fact to a Congressional staffer, he said--and I think I used hundreds of people grow sugar--he said: Well, it's more like a dozen. Even more depressing.
Very little. Because it's not in the self-interest of the recipients to figure it out. What housewife is going to spend the time to save the extra moneyâ"maybe it's $5.00 or $10.00 a year she pays extra on sugar? It doesn't pay to try to figure out. What you're dealing with is rational ignorance. The rational part is what I want to emphasize. It's not ignorance that is avoidable because it's rational to be ignorant.
The problem with this is that the sugar families note that hardly anyone is actively complaining and use this to argue "well, no one complains, so it's all right".
In the courts, the flow of money is tangible, whereas pervasive resentment masked by rational ignorance is not. JSTOR will attempt to use this to their advantage. The only way to drive a wedge into this equation is to make both sides tangible.
I'm reading the final book of the Baroque Cycle right now. Who let you out of the book? You sound just like a Tory scrivener.
Of course, if you're so easily lead by the nose into the "fear and greed" school of business, of course your backers will be quick to exploit this. You've lashed yourself to the bilge pump. Happy treading.
In every business, there's a right balance between short term necessity and vision for the long haul. Many small businesses have been scuttled by hard nosed investors who inhaled too much (or too little) coinage fume while the world was changing around them, to paraphrase 3000 pages.
I might add it seems to me that running a glitzy space program (on the back of a trillion dollars in debt) seems like entirely the wrong kind of venture for a world superpower mesmerized by the looming death-throes of the carbon economy.
Then again, nothing clears the mind like making a beeline for calamity when your your fate is welded to a fragile vessel surrounded by an infinity of not air.
we are pathologically afraid of the risk of extraordinarily brave and competent individuals dying on a PR junket
There's nothing the fuck up there. But let me know if you have a viable business model for harvesting cosmic rays with ugly bags of mostly water.
Meanwhile, the space program consumes many of the best and brightest who could be working on pressing problems down here. As for unmanned exploration, it's not like we're on some kind of short term deadline. Planets tend to hang for the long haul.
Or is Salo of Trafalmadore erecting his own personal Death Star out of robotic petulance?
I read the same article. The problem is that the entire article should be rendered as fine print underneath a HOLLYWOOD sized YMMV billboard.
Also the TCO on SSD taints the economics: failure modes are changing at a speed that gives even a hard core geek a rational ignorance skin rash. There was a nice post above on the physics of desperation. I can add DRAM without a major update to my mental catalog of high-performance electronics failure modes.
Also I don't get the economic argument in the first place. With 8GB of RAM, I rarely find myself disk bound except on huge datasets that also verge on CPU bound.
I don't think they are talking about a speed increase of the kind where you could integrate over a 24 hour period and declare "you saved 10 minutes today". They are talking about speed which shows up in a higher derivative, making "attention span" an essential parameter of the workload simulated.
HDD performance is within *my* attention span 99% of the time. Or put it another way, every application I use regularly is permanently open on one desktop or another. Starting an application fresh every 15 minutes and manually placing the newly open windows where I wish them to be is *not* within my attention span.
Does this incredible (and cheap) SSD performance increment save more time than the average person wastes in a day shuffling window placement on applications of short duration?
People with a vested interest against change invest exceptional vehemence in queering any initiative that reeks of cost-effective progress. Here 1%, there 1%, pretty soon you're driving a solar powered apple cart.
People are raising eyebrows about painting asphalt. For a real challenge, try slathering another layer of ridicule on ex-president Clinton after the Republicans spooged a million cans of peach mint flavoured Dream Whip on his illustrious doings.
I'm late to the party, but this seems like a pre-adolescent game of "Hot or Not" where you prove you've got what it takes by stealing someone else's lunch money while carefully gauging the group reaction, then scanning it's periphery for insecure girls in disclosure mode. At least, that's how it was played back in the day when the human body still had secrets.
What's the point of power if you don't test the boundaries? Especially if you're stuck with a tree fort business model.
Nothing will change; the utilities will keep fucking us over every chance they get. I'm not sure why this still surprises anyone.
You're part of the problem, but this doesn't surprise me at all. Greater society is to blame. I've been reading and thinking intensively in the area of economics and the foundation of wealth. Why are some societies better off than others? Ideological purity? I think not.
The people thinking above the scale of the last quarterly profit report are widely in agreement that wealthy societies have superior social institutions. This shows up most of all in discussions about the rule of law. If you think rule of law makes a society impervious to corruption, you're smoking the drapes. But on a larger scale, there's a lot to it. There are certain kinds of financial and legal shenanigans that we implicitly don't accept, where someone in Africa would be posting "I'm not sure why this surprises anyone" about intermittent refrigeration.
America is the most effective venture capital market in human history for good reason: pragmatic presumptions about rule of law are right more often than wrong. You think the Russians drink for no reason?
This is a bit like people thinking there's a health care crisis in America, completely blind to the retirement savings crisis. These are not compatible crises, to the discerning mind. Yes, the health care system is mired in lamentable suckitude. Rule of law is the nucleus of the fruit, not the whole thing. The flesh of the fruit is the venal nature of business and politics as usual. Yes, we've noticed.
The reason that people act as if this kind of behaviour from Verizon is shockingly unexpected is because we cling to the march of human history as mediated by communal opprobrium. The rule of law is still in there and dictates shared attitudes more than you think.
Not in a thousand years will you catch me playing the learned helplessness card on the rule of law. Yes, you might look more hip by stating what's superficially obvious. You're also throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Recently I listened to Dan Carlin interview Gwynne Dyer. He echos what Stephen Pinker has also put forward: human violence is on a significant downward trend over the past 3000 years. It spiked wildly upward when we first started to confine ourselves to permanent settlements. Since then, we've been coming to terms, with millennial stubbornness.
Concerning nuclear weapons in the 20'th century Dyer remarked "we passed the midterm", i.e. we haven't yet blown civilization sky high. Dyer is a specialist in the history of warfare. I didn't much care for his lectures on global warming, nor his comment in the Carlin interview that replacing fossil fuels with alternative sources is just a "diddle" costing 1% of GDP, or some insanely small figure. Shockingly, one idiocy doesn't make him wrong about everything else. He views a looming evacuation of Bangladesh as portent to the end of civilization. Clearly he sees the progressive detente of the past 3000 years as strictly territorial, as if the moment you displace a human from his emotional patch of soil, we're right back to baboons. He could be right. Israel has only taught us so far how things could get an awful lot worse. I got sucked into a long conversation with a Turkish political refugee (now Canadian) about the Israeli question the other day. My god, the learned helplessness card had never looked fatter or more attractive. But still I resist.
Nothing will change in the United States without a revolution, which would first require a huge sea change in the culture to even be remotely effective.
It was a huge insight for me when I read that disgust was a primary emotion, and that purity was a universal cultural response (emphasized to different degrees in different societies).
We'll just suspend rule of law while we fix the purity problem by draining the creme of the social and
My first programming experience was an SC/MP homebrew with 2k of RAM built by a local college instructor who loaned it to me as a high school freshman, after giving me a ten minute introduction to hexadecimal, four times as long as necessary, since my father had taught me binary in 1972, after learning it from a student at his church when he returned from a stint as one of Iverson's APL proteges. If only the college instructor homebrew wizard had taught me that twos complement branch targets were computed after the PC updated, I would have managed to sleep that night before 03:00. Man can not live on forward jumps alone. It was a year later before I first experienced an ENTER key.
Here's the thing: how many people like me went head-first into computing at the age that I did? Half the people I worked with on my early work terms were 30-year-olds with psychology degrees with the knack for rule systems, who just showed up somewhere and announced they were willing to learn.
How many people who entered the profession in the 1980s as thirty-somethings were going to hang in there much past the age of 45? I don't that was in the cards for most of them.
I consider myself among the vanguard of silver sourcers bred in the bone. Even in elementary school, I was drawing flowcharts for decision procedures, in emulation of the *one* useful computer science book my father was able to borrow for me from the local university library. There just wasn't much of a general nature available. By the time I hit grade five, I was seriously convinced that flow charts suck. What moron invented that? Although a flow chart does provide a clear expression that your socks go on before your shoes, they didn't seem to scale well to anything complex or subtle. A flowchart for my optimal solitaire strategy would have covered a wall.
This was before the Mythical Man Month. One morning on the drive to school the book was reviewed enthusiastically on the country-ish radio station my father preferred and we immediately charted course for the nearest techno-chic book store. Yeah right. To several higher powers.
This profession is ruthless to an almost unprecedented degree in the amount of self-reinvention required to stay relevant. What other profession has as its founding premise that anything you can do well the machine can do better? Most of our value work occurs in the band of things we can't quite do well, yet. Our reward for succeeding? A T-shirt reading "been there, done that, wrote the script".
Something I used to say a lot 15 years ago to programmers with less experience: "your compiler is lying to you". This was back in the day where compilers had not yet entirely thrown off their shifty origins.
These days I struggle to make sense of how far up the jello stack I've moved in my value add. This past week I've been working with the Functional Data Analysis package in R. There are matrices at work behind the scenes who merest dimensions I am not worthy to investigate. But the magic is cool, there's no denying.
I get some of my own back when I'm working with Rinline and Rcpp. The article yesterday about the history of ethernet said that an entire frame in the newest standard is transmitted in a single 10M bit time. In my recent R work, where I used to think of the C++ compiler as a platform, I now regard it as a helper routine.
The kind of recent Stanford grad that Google prefers to hire would understand as much as I do about R at the high level, and would have a pretty good general understanding of what the C++ compiler is there to do. With my deeper background, in the event of an anomaly, I could pursue it to the ends of the earth: this line of g++ source code has selected the wrong instruction addressing mode in the VMX instruction set recently added. That would be like returning to the home town where I grew up, and discovering that the pubs were bigger than ever, but the parking lots weren't. It would be both familiar, yet unfamiliar. And if it's not g++, I cou
Was BSD relevant at some point? I think I was sick that day. Could you fax 'round the memo so I can update the logs? "BSD was relevant today. Huzzah! Who knows what tomorrow will bring!"
Remember to sign your entry "So long, and thanks for all the packets!"
Tomorrow will bring a centrally controlled internet. Huzzah!
I understand the benefit of having a FOSS driver, but why would anyone in their right mind buy a $300-500 video card, then cripple the shit out of it by using the FOSS driver when their exists a proprietary driver that will give you 100% of the card's potential performance?
There's actually some logic here. The virtues of open source are similar to the virtues of slow cooking. The slow cooking approach is to pay $150 for a video card, then cripple the shit out of it with open source drivers, for any application less than a year old. Any application that ran fine on a god machine two years ago will probably run fine on a slow cooker today.
Spending less than half as much, we can iterate twice as often, but only if and when we need to. I dabble with OpenCL. With AMD tearing up the roadmap faster than the technology matures (goodbye VLIW, hello GCN), I'm not stocking my development machines with 12 cylinder Ferrarae.
I applaud AMD for setting out on the Paris Dakar to performance convergence. Not every race worth winning ends with an explosive parachute.
New research in the social and cognitive sciences makes it increasingly plain that metaphorical thinking influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways.
Seriously, what's the bigram troll score on the word pair "safely assume", not even counting the contribution of "Paypal" in tilting the phrase context.
And then, if you progress to lexical data mining, where does "Paypal" wind up in the lexical activation map? Somewhere near "Taxjoy" if you ask me.
Taxjoy safely predicts the end of US government debt by 2015. We could make the taxation process even more convenient than Paypal by remitting 100% of earned income. After all, convenience is the only criteria in matters of wealth.
What Thompson should have said is that among the guys he worked with, poor quality work would have been detected faster than Tony Soprano receiving a thin envelope from a deadbeat nephew with a drug problem.
I don't recall Furio being debriefed ever. Performance norms were adequately enforced by the custom of passing thick envelopes.
On the Firefox team entering into year five of dribblegate, you can make a case for additional code review. The performance norms pertaining to background memory leak are a lot softer and benefit more from up front scrutiny. Also, a better architecture might be considered. But failing that, code review is an excellent second line.
China needs to achieve 25% of the American per capita income rates to become the world's largest economy as measured in raw dollars.
The main evidence that they won't achieve this relatively soon is the amount of equity they presently hold in the American economy. At the rate things are going, they'll soon wish they had invested elsewhere.
Once China reaches GDP parity with America, it will be a symbolic victory only. China will still be an economy with an agricultural sector resembling America 100 years ago. Their social institutions will take generations to evolve and improve. People underestimate the amount of social equity in an advanced economy.
The more interesting benchmark is when China achieves resource consumption parity with America for Joe Random strategic resource. That will maybe happen a decade after China reaches GDP parity.
This will create a bit of a seller's market for primary resources (short of America toppling a Chinese regime). Our foothold in Afghanistan might even pay future dividends.
As for learning Chinese, I worked with Chinese/Japanese/Korean languages from 1985 until the early 1990s back when these languages were poorly supported. I took several Chinese courses at university, and listened to a lot of Japanese instructional tapes.
Except for a very small percentage of gifted people, learning a second language *for the first time* as an adult is a hellacious amount of work. I had no trouble with Chinese grammar, because my mind already processes grammar at a higher level of abstraction.
For instance, most people think of singular and plural. Idiots. It's really singular and non-singular.
negative one books zero books one book one point five books two books
Fowler made a distinction between "fewer" for counting nouns, and "less" for mass nouns (continuous quantities). This distinction was ruined by the express check-out line. He also distinguished "between" for a party of two, and "among" for a party N>2.
Most people think of possessive pronouns as a branch of property law. Idiots. "Possessive" is actually used in language to indicated a preferred relationship according to largest eigenvalue in whichever mode of PCA analysis is established within the discourse, e.g. the car I borrowed is "my car" if the person I'm talking to is distressingly car-less, and couldn't give a rat's ass how the car I arrive in was originally procured.
Grammar devolves into metaphor surprisingly often.
Even starting from this proficiency with the abstractions of the verbal mind, in the end I could hardly justify the net-present-value of becoming proficient with Chinese to any serviceable level, without actually living in China.
The the time China passes America on more than a handful of critical economic metrics, software translation will be plenty adequate for 95% of people doing business with China.
I should add here that learning the Chinese writing system is no small project. Reading is enough of a challenge, writing is pure masochism. The Chinese speech system is surprisingly regular with only four or five challenging consonants (c,x,q,zh in pinyin). You just need to completely rewire your tone perception from the music part of your brain to the linguistic part of your brain. I'm not joking. Sounds the brain perceives as linguistic are suppressed from other forms of scrutiny. TED had a recent video about early language learning. It's very early in the language process that the brain codes which sounds are language and which ones aren't (the other active brain skills are sucking, drooling, and eye contact).
One thing I will say is that if people had more appreciation for the social equity of an advanced technological society, maybe people wouldn't be so actively trying to tear America apart from within. Some of the anti-government voices out there have no clue about the difference between the baby and the bath water. Time after time I listen to economists talk about the world econom
The difference between nearly causing an accident at roundabout speed rather than highway speed is that the other drivers have plenty of time to get properly raged up. I don't trust average driver perception one whit. There's a lot of objective data out there on accident rates, so I don't even know why the rageometer is part of this dialog. Most male drivers interpret any intrusion on hell-bent-for-metal as "almost causing an accident".
Definition: almost causing an accident
If I had leaned over to fetch my cellphone off the passenger floor matt at precisely the wrong moment, I would have rear-ended the guy coming in on the merge lane who paid no attention at all to the fact that I was cruising at twenty over the limit and my head wasn't even visible through the windshield.
The biggest thing about safe driving is to realize that somewhere among all the idiots and Darwincers is someone who got a phone call first thing in the morning that his or her mother went to hospital in an ambulance last night. And all you're worried about is your GF's sharp tongue when you show up ten minutes late, even though you knew perfectly well when you left that it was barely possible to make up enough time on the road, assuming everyone else on the road was dialed in for an F1 rally.
Quote from Romer in an EconTalk podcast: Everyone wants (economic) growth, but no-one wants change. Change happens. Adjust your rageometer accordingly.
In the immortal words of Ricky Ricardo, "Lucy, you've got some defining to do!" This never occurred to me, but now that you mention it, I can see how it equates to zero. One guy gets shot in the trenches, lies groaning in the mud and feces holding his intestines inside his belly with a tin dinner plate. The guy who shot him survives the firefight, goes off to the nearest Asian brothel so shoot up with a grade of heroine you can only obtain in the Asian jungle. Misery on one side, bliss on the other, the perfect zero sum outcome. Now I know why the heroine habit is so difficult to kick: it's the zero-sum compliment to lying in feces and mud holding your guts inside your belly with a tin dinner plate. Potent stuff. Man, I gotta get me some of that.
It's certainly true that conflict flares up around primary constraints. In some cases the constraints are created by war itself. I'm sure Lawrence Waterhouse could jot down and solve the differential equations as a short digression from a tedious moment. Somehow I don't think his solution, valid as it might be, would have won him the Nobel prize in economics.
I've always figured from the perspective of a shiny new officer's uniform, that the principle spoils of war were babalicious war widows back in his home town. From her perspective, after the waterworks ends, it's zero sum, isn't it? The new man in her life had the wits to come out on top. That's almost an upgrade, even.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a case where I wish I hadn't RTFA. None of these glib aphorisms turn full circle. It scares me that he's willing to throw out dangerous sound-bites with no guard rails for the unwary.
I think he also has a bad case of bafflegab envy: where your investors decide your company is worth twice as much because everything you say runs against common sense. We've had a few investment cycles where all the money was chasing after anti-gravity machines.
No doubt you can dress funny on the road to success if you're funded to twice the level that any rational person would pony into. This is the "Confederacy of Dunces" business model. Works great if you can pull it off.
You're touching on a lot of things I agree with, and topics I'm sure I've covered in many previous comments, not that I could find such a post among all the chaff I generate on a regular basis.
Rehabilitation is way out of fashion, right beside "more taxes" in the Tea Room of partitioned prosperity. The modern fashion is to vote people off the island. America was founded on the ideal (so I believe) of being less class-bound than the UK and more fiscally mobile than the rest of Europe. Just like Quebec, where French changes less than in France, America has returned to what they once rejected and becomes ever more desperate to establish a permanent scarlet-letter underclass; the housing boom in the penal system continues unabated by the financial crisis.
It's funny this topic comes up on the same day as the "do dumb things" admonition from a Google exec. I post under pseudonyms precisely for this reason: it encourages me to push the envelope in what I express. Sometimes I'm rude, but usually briefly, and typically in response to people posting way under their intellectual punching weight (because that takes work and it might impair erectile function to divert the blood flow to Woody's second favorite organ).
Also, I have no desire to see a response on another forum "but you made a stupid post on Slashdot saying exactly the opposite!" Yeah, maybe I did, and maybe you had to be there.
If I were a complete turd, I suppose I would someday run out of karma, and my posts would begin life among the rabble on 'B' Ark. This hasn't happened anywhere I post so far as I've noticed.
Vonnegut, as usual, was prophetic in this matter. From Cat's Cradle as cribbed by Back Words Indexing which perhaps quoted more than they should have, though I concur with the temptation.
I think I'll pass on immolating myself into the great index in the public Google+ planetarium of everything I've ever been.
That's a great post, of the kind that saves me a lot of typing. You covered the first-order considerations brilliantly.
What you missed was technical debt blindness, which has been around since forever. Books I read around the time of the Mythical Man Month talked a lot about maintenance syndrome: that the original development team would be regarded as brilliant for producing working functionality at tremendous speed (undocumented, with no error handling for edge cases), then the first maintenance team would all be fired as underachievers for adding hardly any new functionality in the first year or two.
Turns out it's hard to erect a machine shop over top of adobe mud brick construction without adding some reinforcement to the structure, which usually takes a lot longer than the entire original edifice.
You can instead take a wrecking ball to the first iteration, but this rarely works out as well as hoped. You end up with far more ambitious adobe mud construction built with a whole new generation of unproven tools. At some point you have to bite the bullet and ferment what you began with.
People hide debt blindness behind widely divergent construals of simplicity, where "simple" usually turns out to be a euphemism for any decision that sidesteps paying down debt in the short term.
For professional software engineers, there is one true simplicity to rule them all: generativity and compositionality. Can you build the next layer on top with any hope of having it work and able to support an ongoing stack? For us, it's a long term game of pass the baton. For everyone else (management, scientists) the endgame is to cash out, and take credit elsewhere (e.g. publication biography).
Unfortunately, a citation is not a formal linkage that the compiler either accepts or rejects. By the standards of compositionality, citation is payment in dubious coin. Citation is not falsifiable. Scientists still count their citations even when they come from papers that are full of crap, peer review notwithstanding. For a professional software engineer, when you start instantiating objects from one library inside an abstract expression template library, you come face to face with compositionality in a way that few scientists can even imagine, having weened at the outrage of being improperly cited.
Technical debt blindness on the part of management quickly turns a software engineering shop into a highly non-linear fiasco. We've all seen this.
Somehow this game works out better (for the participants) when played by bankers with leverage debt. But now it's my turn to pass the baton, since that deserves a whole lot more typing and I've done my bit.
Since Google knows full well that they intend to enforce their TOS terms with automated scripts that will certainly have some residual false positive rate no matter how much they burnish and buff, and they never intend to provide manpower to handle all of the complaints (which potentially includes every account they lock out for legitimate reasons) they need to take a more moderate view on the terms of suspension.
One of the consequences is that you lose access to your own personal information. Google should certainly provide a mechanism for a locked-out user to retrieve a copy of their email and calendar as of the time of lock-out.
An automated system with no human appeal mechanism should not be flirting with disenfranchisement.
I'm from the same era, I do the same things.
Under different aliases I've leaked enough information to have various identities joined together, but I comfort myself with the naive pretense that since I've kept these identities separate and *not* directly identified myself in any way, that this was a choice consciously made that ought to be respected by Data Galore.
I do a lot of searches on Google because certain patterns of letters amuse me: I like to make up obscure code names for little projects with multiple puns embedded. I do a lot of serious search. And I do a lot of peripheral search because I read something and I go "I can't believe (a) some guy said that or (b) what some guy said".
This presents some problems for the people who believe that what you search is what you are. My search background is probably pushing into the 100,000 territory. On a rampage, I've done 1000 searches per day.
If you listed out the 100 strangest things I've searched for over the last decade, by the standards of someone who might have only made a few hundred searches in their life (all of which returned prebuilt search results), such a person might think I'm the next unibomber in training. I spent half a day once reading about Hafnium nuclear isomers. What well-mannered person would be poking his nose around in something like that? I also spent half a day once going pretty far down the JFK conspiracy-theory rabbit hole. I emerged unscathed, but you'd never know if from my search history.
The notion that you are what you search for can only lead to the worst forms of thought control. Especially if you are also *any chosen subset* of same. Subsetting is, of course, a time-honoured tradition for wielding the scarlet letter. Just ask Michael Moore or Oliver Stone.
"Are you now or have you ever been a searcher of names of radical apparatchiks?" Yes, your honour, including "Ayn Rand" and "CIA Bush cocaine", "Cardinal Ratzinger", and "Soros conspiracy". Or were you meaning to exclude the searches conducted while I was singing to myself "lulululu lulululu" to the theme of Twilight Zone? It appears my search history begs for a soundtrack.
In some forums more than others I push the envelope on conventional norms, or dial sarcasm up so high, I'm not sure myself by the time I'm done what I've lampooned. Some times I try to pull off a trick shot. Sometimes I try and fail.
If you asked me, "what exactly did you mean by such and such a twisted circumlocution reeking [on the surface] of antisemitism?" in many cases I'd be as stumped as my interlocutor and I'd have to resort to my baseline attitude "I was probably trying to say that racist people suck shrouded in a garden-path pretense of saying the opposite".
Here's the thing. People won't think unless they identify you as one of their own. If you can get the thinking and the identifying far enough out of sync, you might occasionally manage to put over a forbidden concept into a walled mental garden. (With about the same shooting odds as dropping a field goal from mid court; it's a bad shot, but cool when it drops.)
In other cases, the lynch pin of my diatribe might come back to me; if it comes back to me, there's no guarantee it makes sense or that what I set out to accomplish actually worked; and even if I'm pleased with the verbal device in retrospect, I'd need a ouija board connection to Douglas Adams with his phantasmal head stuffed into a seer-stone hat to help me translate the layers of backspin to the average dipshit who believes in a) ouija boards or b) seer stones.
Count my vote for "you are what you search" or "you are what your pseudonyms spout" as the WORST. IDEAS. EVER. I'm not keen on signing up to a social networking Stonehenge, because I just don't hew to the self-identity police. At the same time, I consider myself hardcore about authenticity in everything I write, under any guise. Authenticity, however, is a slippery concept since humans are emotional creatures. Authenticity of the moment
Ah yes, nothing sells like the unslakable demand to not be inconvenienced by your own stupidity. Many of these same people just want to get drunk without being inconvenienced by flavour. Excess compression is the musical equivalent of macro-brew alcohol.
Last night I went to a new micro-brew down the street which was pretty good. The bitter and IPA were excellent. The Summer Ale wasn't quite right. I asked the bartender for a lime, and then it was pretty good. Some of DO want to play with the dials.
Since I don't believe in god, playing with the dials is pretty much what I live for.
s/$(previous_lame_subject_line)/rational ignorance meets punctured equilibrium
When your entrenched adversary of nickle-and-diming shows a moment of weakness, it's time for rational mob psychology.
There's a connection here to rational ignorance. Rational ignorance is when you don't bother to understand and complain about the sugar quota, because it's only costing you a few dollars per year, whereas informing yourself and complaining about it would cost a lot more.
From George Will on America, Politics, and Baseball
From An Interview with Milton Friedman
The problem with this is that the sugar families note that hardly anyone is actively complaining and use this to argue "well, no one complains, so it's all right".
In the courts, the flow of money is tangible, whereas pervasive resentment masked by rational ignorance is not. JSTOR will attempt to use this to their advantage. The only way to drive a wedge into this equation is to make both sides tangible.
I'm reading the final book of the Baroque Cycle right now. Who let you out of the book? You sound just like a Tory scrivener.
Of course, if you're so easily lead by the nose into the "fear and greed" school of business, of course your backers will be quick to exploit this. You've lashed yourself to the bilge pump. Happy treading.
In every business, there's a right balance between short term necessity and vision for the long haul. Many small businesses have been scuttled by hard nosed investors who inhaled too much (or too little) coinage fume while the world was changing around them, to paraphrase 3000 pages.
I might add it seems to me that running a glitzy space program (on the back of a trillion dollars in debt) seems like entirely the wrong kind of venture for a world superpower mesmerized by the looming death-throes of the carbon economy.
Then again, nothing clears the mind like making a beeline for calamity when your your fate is welded to a fragile vessel surrounded by an infinity of not air.
There's nothing the fuck up there. But let me know if you have a viable business model for harvesting cosmic rays with ugly bags of mostly water.
Meanwhile, the space program consumes many of the best and brightest who could be working on pressing problems down here. As for unmanned exploration, it's not like we're on some kind of short term deadline. Planets tend to hang for the long haul.
Or is Salo of Trafalmadore erecting his own personal Death Star out of robotic petulance?
I read the same article. The problem is that the entire article should be rendered as fine print underneath a HOLLYWOOD sized YMMV billboard.
Also the TCO on SSD taints the economics: failure modes are changing at a speed that gives even a hard core geek a rational ignorance skin rash. There was a nice post above on the physics of desperation. I can add DRAM without a major update to my mental catalog of high-performance electronics failure modes.
Also I don't get the economic argument in the first place. With 8GB of RAM, I rarely find myself disk bound except on huge datasets that also verge on CPU bound.
I don't think they are talking about a speed increase of the kind where you could integrate over a 24 hour period and declare "you saved 10 minutes today". They are talking about speed which shows up in a higher derivative, making "attention span" an essential parameter of the workload simulated.
HDD performance is within *my* attention span 99% of the time. Or put it another way, every application I use regularly is permanently open on one desktop or another. Starting an application fresh every 15 minutes and manually placing the newly open windows where I wish them to be is *not* within my attention span.
Does this incredible (and cheap) SSD performance increment save more time than the average person wastes in a day shuffling window placement on applications of short duration?
I bet not.
People with a vested interest against change invest exceptional vehemence in queering any initiative that reeks of cost-effective progress. Here 1%, there 1%, pretty soon you're driving a solar powered apple cart.
People are raising eyebrows about painting asphalt. For a real challenge, try slathering another layer of ridicule on ex-president Clinton after the Republicans spooged a million cans of peach mint flavoured Dream Whip on his illustrious doings.
I'm late to the party, but this seems like a pre-adolescent game of "Hot or Not" where you prove you've got what it takes by stealing someone else's lunch money while carefully gauging the group reaction, then scanning it's periphery for insecure girls in disclosure mode. At least, that's how it was played back in the day when the human body still had secrets.
What's the point of power if you don't test the boundaries? Especially if you're stuck with a tree fort business model.
You're part of the problem, but this doesn't surprise me at all. Greater society is to blame. I've been reading and thinking intensively in the area of economics and the foundation of wealth. Why are some societies better off than others? Ideological purity? I think not.
The people thinking above the scale of the last quarterly profit report are widely in agreement that wealthy societies have superior social institutions. This shows up most of all in discussions about the rule of law. If you think rule of law makes a society impervious to corruption, you're smoking the drapes. But on a larger scale, there's a lot to it. There are certain kinds of financial and legal shenanigans that we implicitly don't accept, where someone in Africa would be posting "I'm not sure why this surprises anyone" about intermittent refrigeration.
America is the most effective venture capital market in human history for good reason: pragmatic presumptions about rule of law are right more often than wrong. You think the Russians drink for no reason?
This is a bit like people thinking there's a health care crisis in America, completely blind to the retirement savings crisis. These are not compatible crises, to the discerning mind. Yes, the health care system is mired in lamentable suckitude. Rule of law is the nucleus of the fruit, not the whole thing. The flesh of the fruit is the venal nature of business and politics as usual. Yes, we've noticed.
The reason that people act as if this kind of behaviour from Verizon is shockingly unexpected is because we cling to the march of human history as mediated by communal opprobrium. The rule of law is still in there and dictates shared attitudes more than you think.
Not in a thousand years will you catch me playing the learned helplessness card on the rule of law. Yes, you might look more hip by stating what's superficially obvious. You're also throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Recently I listened to Dan Carlin interview Gwynne Dyer. He echos what Stephen Pinker has also put forward: human violence is on a significant downward trend over the past 3000 years. It spiked wildly upward when we first started to confine ourselves to permanent settlements. Since then, we've been coming to terms, with millennial stubbornness.
Concerning nuclear weapons in the 20'th century Dyer remarked "we passed the midterm", i.e. we haven't yet blown civilization sky high. Dyer is a specialist in the history of warfare. I didn't much care for his lectures on global warming, nor his comment in the Carlin interview that replacing fossil fuels with alternative sources is just a "diddle" costing 1% of GDP, or some insanely small figure. Shockingly, one idiocy doesn't make him wrong about everything else. He views a looming evacuation of Bangladesh as portent to the end of civilization. Clearly he sees the progressive detente of the past 3000 years as strictly territorial, as if the moment you displace a human from his emotional patch of soil, we're right back to baboons. He could be right. Israel has only taught us so far how things could get an awful lot worse. I got sucked into a long conversation with a Turkish political refugee (now Canadian) about the Israeli question the other day. My god, the learned helplessness card had never looked fatter or more attractive. But still I resist.
It was a huge insight for me when I read that disgust was a primary emotion, and that purity was a universal cultural response (emphasized to different degrees in different societies).
We'll just suspend rule of law while we fix the purity problem by draining the creme of the social and
My first programming experience was an SC/MP homebrew with 2k of RAM built by a local college instructor who loaned it to me as a high school freshman, after giving me a ten minute introduction to hexadecimal, four times as long as necessary, since my father had taught me binary in 1972, after learning it from a student at his church when he returned from a stint as one of Iverson's APL proteges. If only the college instructor homebrew wizard had taught me that twos complement branch targets were computed after the PC updated, I would have managed to sleep that night before 03:00. Man can not live on forward jumps alone. It was a year later before I first experienced an ENTER key.
Here's the thing: how many people like me went head-first into computing at the age that I did? Half the people I worked with on my early work terms were 30-year-olds with psychology degrees with the knack for rule systems, who just showed up somewhere and announced they were willing to learn.
How many people who entered the profession in the 1980s as thirty-somethings were going to hang in there much past the age of 45? I don't that was in the cards for most of them.
I consider myself among the vanguard of silver sourcers bred in the bone. Even in elementary school, I was drawing flowcharts for decision procedures, in emulation of the *one* useful computer science book my father was able to borrow for me from the local university library. There just wasn't much of a general nature available. By the time I hit grade five, I was seriously convinced that flow charts suck. What moron invented that? Although a flow chart does provide a clear expression that your socks go on before your shoes, they didn't seem to scale well to anything complex or subtle. A flowchart for my optimal solitaire strategy would have covered a wall.
This was before the Mythical Man Month. One morning on the drive to school the book was reviewed enthusiastically on the country-ish radio station my father preferred and we immediately charted course for the nearest techno-chic book store. Yeah right. To several higher powers.
This profession is ruthless to an almost unprecedented degree in the amount of self-reinvention required to stay relevant. What other profession has as its founding premise that anything you can do well the machine can do better? Most of our value work occurs in the band of things we can't quite do well, yet. Our reward for succeeding? A T-shirt reading "been there, done that, wrote the script".
Something I used to say a lot 15 years ago to programmers with less experience: "your compiler is lying to you". This was back in the day where compilers had not yet entirely thrown off their shifty origins.
These days I struggle to make sense of how far up the jello stack I've moved in my value add. This past week I've been working with the Functional Data Analysis package in R. There are matrices at work behind the scenes who merest dimensions I am not worthy to investigate. But the magic is cool, there's no denying.
I get some of my own back when I'm working with Rinline and Rcpp. The article yesterday about the history of ethernet said that an entire frame in the newest standard is transmitted in a single 10M bit time. In my recent R work, where I used to think of the C++ compiler as a platform, I now regard it as a helper routine.
The kind of recent Stanford grad that Google prefers to hire would understand as much as I do about R at the high level, and would have a pretty good general understanding of what the C++ compiler is there to do. With my deeper background, in the event of an anomaly, I could pursue it to the ends of the earth: this line of g++ source code has selected the wrong instruction addressing mode in the VMX instruction set recently added. That would be like returning to the home town where I grew up, and discovering that the pubs were bigger than ever, but the parking lots weren't. It would be both familiar, yet unfamiliar. And if it's not g++, I cou
Was BSD relevant at some point? I think I was sick that day. Could you fax 'round the memo so I can update the logs? "BSD was relevant today. Huzzah! Who knows what tomorrow will bring!"
Remember to sign your entry "So long, and thanks for all the packets!"
Tomorrow will bring a centrally controlled internet. Huzzah!
There's actually some logic here. The virtues of open source are similar to the virtues of slow cooking. The slow cooking approach is to pay $150 for a video card, then cripple the shit out of it with open source drivers, for any application less than a year old. Any application that ran fine on a god machine two years ago will probably run fine on a slow cooker today.
Spending less than half as much, we can iterate twice as often, but only if and when we need to. I dabble with OpenCL. With AMD tearing up the roadmap faster than the technology matures (goodbye VLIW, hello GCN), I'm not stocking my development machines with 12 cylinder Ferrarae.
I applaud AMD for setting out on the Paris Dakar to performance convergence. Not every race worth winning ends with an explosive parachute.
This is why company's work hard to control how and when information is shared with the public.
Sometimes you just can't help yourself.
From What's a Metaphor For?:
... that slashdot has jumped the editorial shark
Seriously, what's the bigram troll score on the word pair "safely assume", not even counting the contribution of "Paypal" in tilting the phrase context.
And then, if you progress to lexical data mining, where does "Paypal" wind up in the lexical activation map? Somewhere near "Taxjoy" if you ask me.
Taxjoy safely predicts the end of US government debt by 2015. We could make the taxation process even more convenient than Paypal by remitting 100% of earned income. After all, convenience is the only criteria in matters of wealth.
What Thompson should have said is that among the guys he worked with, poor quality work would have been detected faster than Tony Soprano receiving a thin envelope from a deadbeat nephew with a drug problem.
I don't recall Furio being debriefed ever. Performance norms were adequately enforced by the custom of passing thick envelopes.
On the Firefox team entering into year five of dribblegate, you can make a case for additional code review. The performance norms pertaining to background memory leak are a lot softer and benefit more from up front scrutiny. Also, a better architecture might be considered. But failing that, code review is an excellent second line.
It's not just a question of intellect if one party is on the easy side of the trap door function, and their adversary isn't.
Given Microsoft's traditional shortcomings in mental subtlety, I'm not eager to concede they've properly thought this position through.
Just wait until bitcoin merges with the global ad hoc network. Even Microsoft will gulp at the rental fees on a fully commissioned Death Star.
China needs to achieve 25% of the American per capita income rates to become the world's largest economy as measured in raw dollars.
The main evidence that they won't achieve this relatively soon is the amount of equity they presently hold in the American economy. At the rate things are going, they'll soon wish they had invested elsewhere.
Once China reaches GDP parity with America, it will be a symbolic victory only. China will still be an economy with an agricultural sector resembling America 100 years ago. Their social institutions will take generations to evolve and improve. People underestimate the amount of social equity in an advanced economy.
The more interesting benchmark is when China achieves resource consumption parity with America for Joe Random strategic resource. That will maybe happen a decade after China reaches GDP parity.
This will create a bit of a seller's market for primary resources (short of America toppling a Chinese regime). Our foothold in Afghanistan might even pay future dividends.
As for learning Chinese, I worked with Chinese/Japanese/Korean languages from 1985 until the early 1990s back when these languages were poorly supported. I took several Chinese courses at university, and listened to a lot of Japanese instructional tapes.
Except for a very small percentage of gifted people, learning a second language *for the first time* as an adult is a hellacious amount of work. I had no trouble with Chinese grammar, because my mind already processes grammar at a higher level of abstraction.
For instance, most people think of singular and plural. Idiots. It's really singular and non-singular.
negative one books
zero books
one book
one point five books
two books
Fowler made a distinction between "fewer" for counting nouns, and "less" for mass nouns (continuous quantities). This distinction was ruined by the express check-out line. He also distinguished "between" for a party of two, and "among" for a party N>2.
Most people think of possessive pronouns as a branch of property law. Idiots. "Possessive" is actually used in language to indicated a preferred relationship according to largest eigenvalue in whichever mode of PCA analysis is established within the discourse, e.g. the car I borrowed is "my car" if the person I'm talking to is distressingly car-less, and couldn't give a rat's ass how the car I arrive in was originally procured.
Grammar devolves into metaphor surprisingly often.
Even starting from this proficiency with the abstractions of the verbal mind, in the end I could hardly justify the net-present-value of becoming proficient with Chinese to any serviceable level, without actually living in China.
The the time China passes America on more than a handful of critical economic metrics, software translation will be plenty adequate for 95% of people doing business with China.
I should add here that learning the Chinese writing system is no small project. Reading is enough of a challenge, writing is pure masochism. The Chinese speech system is surprisingly regular with only four or five challenging consonants (c,x,q,zh in pinyin). You just need to completely rewire your tone perception from the music part of your brain to the linguistic part of your brain. I'm not joking. Sounds the brain perceives as linguistic are suppressed from other forms of scrutiny. TED had a recent video about early language learning. It's very early in the language process that the brain codes which sounds are language and which ones aren't (the other active brain skills are sucking, drooling, and eye contact).
One thing I will say is that if people had more appreciation for the social equity of an advanced technological society, maybe people wouldn't be so actively trying to tear America apart from within. Some of the anti-government voices out there have no clue about the difference between the baby and the bath water. Time after time I listen to economists talk about the world econom
The difference between nearly causing an accident at roundabout speed rather than highway speed is that the other drivers have plenty of time to get properly raged up. I don't trust average driver perception one whit. There's a lot of objective data out there on accident rates, so I don't even know why the rageometer is part of this dialog. Most male drivers interpret any intrusion on hell-bent-for-metal as "almost causing an accident".
Definition: almost causing an accident
If I had leaned over to fetch my cellphone off the passenger floor matt at precisely the wrong moment, I would have rear-ended the guy coming in on the merge lane who paid no attention at all to the fact that I was cruising at twenty over the limit and my head wasn't even visible through the windshield.
The biggest thing about safe driving is to realize that somewhere among all the idiots and Darwincers is someone who got a phone call first thing in the morning that his or her mother went to hospital in an ambulance last night. And all you're worried about is your GF's sharp tongue when you show up ten minutes late, even though you knew perfectly well when you left that it was barely possible to make up enough time on the road, assuming everyone else on the road was dialed in for an F1 rally.
Quote from Romer in an EconTalk podcast: Everyone wants (economic) growth, but no-one wants change. Change happens. Adjust your rageometer accordingly.
In the immortal words of Ricky Ricardo, "Lucy, you've got some defining to do!" This never occurred to me, but now that you mention it, I can see how it equates to zero. One guy gets shot in the trenches, lies groaning in the mud and feces holding his intestines inside his belly with a tin dinner plate. The guy who shot him survives the firefight, goes off to the nearest Asian brothel so shoot up with a grade of heroine you can only obtain in the Asian jungle. Misery on one side, bliss on the other, the perfect zero sum outcome. Now I know why the heroine habit is so difficult to kick: it's the zero-sum compliment to lying in feces and mud holding your guts inside your belly with a tin dinner plate. Potent stuff. Man, I gotta get me some of that.
It's certainly true that conflict flares up around primary constraints. In some cases the constraints are created by war itself. I'm sure Lawrence Waterhouse could jot down and solve the differential equations as a short digression from a tedious moment. Somehow I don't think his solution, valid as it might be, would have won him the Nobel prize in economics.
I've always figured from the perspective of a shiny new officer's uniform, that the principle spoils of war were babalicious war widows back in his home town. From her perspective, after the waterworks ends, it's zero sum, isn't it? The new man in her life had the wits to come out on top. That's almost an upgrade, even.