Sorry. I should be more clear here. I'm not trying to be anti-military, but at the same tome: no, the military is not a productive part of society. They produce nothing of everyday value, or pretty close to it. Rather, it's a protective part of society. This is important too, but at the end of the day the whole reason for the Army/Navy/whatever is to keep whatever I'm doing (and my neighbors and their neighbors) intact. If all the "bad guys" in the world turned good in a torrent of peace and flowers and sunshine and unicorns heralding the dawn of a new era free from conflict forever, we'd be better off without any troops whatsoever. In the interim, it's good to have them around, but every resource that we devote to the military is diverted from productive activity, and the things people really value in their everyday lives: manufacturing, programming, literature, textiles, art, car-washing, gardening, home improvement, gym memberships, football, education, books on tape, whatever.
Moreover, I'm much better at programming than soldiering. My time really is better spent outside the army.
It's the basic principle of "specialization" which Adam Smith expounded upon in Wealth of Nations
tens of decades ago. Sure, some people can benefit from their career in the military life, plenty.
Some people can appreciate the military culture. I'm not among them.
I would find it oppressive, grating, and obnoxious, and probably feel trapped.
I've got an ingrained anti-authoritarian streak a mile wide, which I prefer to avoid activating.
Finally, if everyone spends some of the formative years of their lives in a very rigid, structured
organization like the military, we as a society would trend towards an organizational monoculture
in the rest of our business world which would hamper our ability to innovate and create
more-efficient business processes, just because everyone has been inculcated the same way.
Now, my family has plenty of military tradition. I can appreciate the military.
My great-grandfather was a hero in the Polish-Bolshevik war. (He got a snazzy
estate on the border, and he and his family were set for life, until the Soviets
rolled in and shipped everyone off to Siberia). My grandfather on the other side of the
family trained to operate a Davy Crockett missile (you know, the "atomic hand grenade").
And now my little brother is thinking of going into the Army. Voluntarily.
He'd have a blast, I'm sure. He'd like it. He's a lot better suited for it than I am.
The nation will be adequately protected without the government
telling me exactly what I'm going to do with 4-6 years of my life.
And you know, in times of great need, like the big world wars, when we have a draft,
sometimes that little infringement is a price that people have to pay, and it's worth it.
But now? For the sake of airline security to possibly theoretically maybe help thwart
a terrorist attack like the one that was just the other day thwarted without that sort of help?
Not worth it. Call me again when there's a real threat to America. Thanks.
That's a really expensive way to do it - in terms of opportunity cost. Those are years of peoples' lives. They could be doing something else, being productive members of society, living their lives (some of the best years of their life, too). In terms of lost wages alone that service would easily cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars - to say nothing of the price of my liberty.
Just dismiss any investigation of it as backwards or some form of vapid tree-hugging, don't study it, and ignore any problems until peoples' expected lifespan returns to 35!
Yeah. What sort of an antisocial jerk is going to subscribe to that twitter feed and sift through a bunch of names of people they've never heard of on the off chance that they run into a neighbor?
No, it isn't. First, his employing university told Galileo that teaching this sort of bleeding-edge science, some of which was outright wrong (including, for instance, his theory of the tides, and his characterizations of pendulums), and furthermore wildly contrasted with the current philisophical-scientific consensus. If you were the dean and your faculty started teaching the Electric Universe, you might be concerned too, even if those kooks ended up being right in another 200 years.
Then when he wrote a book on the matter and Urban VIII asked him to try and go for a neutral point of view on things (a la Wikipedia's design standards, perhaps) he called the Pope's geocentrism guy "Simplicio" and made him look like an idiot. Bad political move. Then Urban acted like a typical 17th-century Italian nobleman - if anything, probably he was somewhat mild for that archetype.
A tragedy of politics and underdeveloped notions of scientific rigor in the extant culture, but cults hade nothing to do with it.
Re:The biotechnology is at least quite believable
on
The Science of Avatar
·
· Score: 1
The neural interface seemed to me like the sort of thing that's unlikely to spontaneously evolved. As one of those flying critters, what does it buy me? A couple of guys come by every once in a while and have a chance of making me their mind slave? No thanks, I'll pass. Therefore, I propose that the entire planet was designed as the retirement community for a highly advanced civilization (the civilization itself retiring, more so than individual members) - much more fun doing it this way than becoming a bunch of brainless eloi. The glimpses into their self-reported histories aren't entirely consistent with this, but the matter could be hidden from casual view.
Well, we can, but I'm not sure you can until you graduate and actually spend some time not living either at your parents' house or in a dorm.
Uh-huh... Your ad hominem attack would be cuter if it were accurate.
And sorry about vague references to economists at large. Don Boudroux and Russell Roberts certainly think that inflation is understated (due to substitution and quality effects). Roberts thinks it's off as much as 1.6% a year (or about 50% wrong if inflation is 3%). I don't think CPI understatement was one of the 40 questions in Whaples' Is There Consensus among American Labor Economists? or anything like that, regrettably.
Just because the CEO's work results in a larger financial transaction doesn't mean he is more productive; he's just doing his job, same as the coder. If they both come in and work hard for eight hours every day, their productivity is equal.
First, we seem to disagree over the basic definition of the word "productivity". I'm using a definition like "the rate at which something is produced" (note the common root in 'produce' and 'production') - in this case, corporate profits. You're using a definition like "the time spent doing labor". This is a rather unconventional metric of productivity, I think.
Second, you might think that I'm defending the current regime as completely fair and righteous. I'm not. I'm just saying that the sort of attacks that are being made against it aren't particularly sound, even if they address real issues.
I can't say that all CEOs are compensated fairly. It's almost certain that many exist which are compensated unfairly. There may be inefficiencies in the current market for CEOs - goodness knows the transaction costs for the guys are pretty darned high. Like many economic inefficiencies, the winners (CEOs) are few but the gains are concentrated; there is great incentive for them to chase that money. The losers (shareholders) are many and their individual stakes small; there is less incentive to chase down that money. This might be one of the more interesting differences in the democratization of the stock markets, compared to the days when the super-super-wealthy were the people who owned big companies. I haven't studied it much, though. Would probably make a snazzy research topic in economic history.
In any event, a good CEO is almost certainly many times more productive than an average programmer. A bad CEO may be counterproductive, but has convinced somebody (the board) that he's worth paying millions. I've seen good management in action, and I realize the value they are capable of bringing to the company, and I don't think a vicious categorical denouncement is appropriate (or all that effective at effecting change, for that matter).
We can debate the relative merits of the real value of the minimum wage at another time
but, in the interim, in the interests of accuracy, for a slightly less anecdotal analysis of the relative value of the US dollar, see MeasuringWorth.com (which suggests $8.48/hr as an equivalent minimum wage, not $17.50, based on the consumer price index). That's a lot closer to par.
I believe most economists suggest that the CPI slightly-overstates inflation by failing to make any adjustment for increases in product quality (things squeezable ketchup bottles instead of glass, or music on an iPod instead of a Walkman, or safer cars less likely to kill you in an accident).
As long as you've got CEOs making 200-400 times the pay of the average worker in the same corporation, it is impossible to have any pay which is "proportional".
This sort of analysis of the business is pretty shallow and based more on emotion and prejudice more than reality and facts. I don't think it's utterly beyond belief that a good CEO can make deals with other bigwigs and boost the company's bottom line at least 200x as much as an average worker can. Furthermore, I think you seem to be conflating the portion of value which is created by the corporate structure (and its access to capital, and its ability to shoulder risk, and its stability in being there for its clients, and its economies of scale) with "exploitation of the worker" (which still may be present, but is probably less than what you're making it out to be).
But then, I suppose I'm wasting my breath: who would ever want to sully political rhetoric with a modicum of rational thought when dealing with a nuanced issue?
When the product is completed, it's likely they'll be let go, since no more work needs to be done. The sales staff could continue selling it for years, and making a profit.
Software that's finished in finite time? (Forever-finished, not just this-release-finished.)
What a concept! Exactly what segment of the industry are you working in over there? If my organization stopped development for a year or two just to sell the existing stuff, our competitors would soon crush us handily.
For the bigwigs: Why embezzle when you can go legit and get the board to pay you snazzy seven-figure bonuses for your continued, valuable contributions to the company's bottom line? I don't think taking that sort of a gamble is consistent with your probable risk profile. Maybe if you're Bernie Maddoff and your firm has lost a ton of money and are too attached to your career and terrified of professional embarrassment or something, but even that's more outright fraud than embezzlement.
For the medium-wigs: Just how much do you think you could get away with embezzling? You probably don't have *that* great of access to funds. And do you really think the bigwigs don't have people watching you pretty carefully when you're trying to make off with company money?
For the not-so-big-wigs: Do you even have access to embezzling money?
Mod parent up. If you can map between the "inside" and the "outside" of your organization you can drop packets coming from the outside just as readily.
And in the UK, we play rugby with similar effect. First thing the US needs to do? Get rid of this fucked up idea that there is any dichotomy between being good at sports and being good academically.
When they released the Enron emails for that particular court case, the academics had a field day: behold! a real live data set of emails. It was useful for the study of text mining techniques: throw some algorithms at it and see the emails automatically classified into categories, and then look and see that this category has all the fantasy-football, and this one has the defraud-the-shareholders, and this other one....
A lot of the power of interpreted languages comes from the abstractions that are put in place to make programming easier. These abstractions have a price in terms of execution time. Furthermore, once you're using an abstraction, there's not a simple way in the imperative paradigm for a compiler to determine that your code needs XYZ part of the abstraction, but not part ABC. You need to do the whole thing.
For example, consider the following. Say bad things about PHP all you want (it deserves it) but one of the things you don't generally see with PHP code is a buffer overflow, where you try to copy a bunch of strings and concatenate them together and you run out of room and don't notice it and you go clobbering memory. That's because the string manipulation code goes through a bunch of checks when you're appending strings. You can't just skip these checks and hope that everything will work the same. You may know that such and such a code-path isn't going to need all the bounds checking because you're, say, idunno, assembling fixed-length ZIP+4 codes or something, but the scripting language can't be informed of that fact using any extant mechanism (nor is it clear how you could integrate such a mechanism with the powerful abstraction that lets you not worry about the rest of your strings to begin with).
Moreover, as has already been pointed out, a lot of the computational price of rendering a web page is database queries and memory-cached-object queries which employ compiled code already. The string-manipulation overhead isn't all that significant compared to the abstraction that it buys you. It's probably a better idea to track down logic issues, where your code does stupid useless computations that it doesn't need that make it slow, or could do certain computations in advance to make it faster, or such.
I think there's a lot more potential for interesting machine optimization of code for things coming from the functional paradigm, where you can mathematically show the equivalence of certain portions of code with its optimized replacement, and that this paradigm will be making a resurgence in some places during the upcoming era of 128-core processors. This might be interesting.
Nope. We just assume that taking away the multimillion-dollar monopoly incentive won't have any effect on pharmaceutical developments and the drugs available (outside of patents) for your children's generation, or even your generation when you retire in 40 years. No effect whatsoever.
I mean, come on, dude, is a little bit of a balanced perspective on a nuanced issue too much to ask?
The case is for fine artists whose early paintings might be sold to a gallery for a couple hundred dollars and is ultimately resold for $10 million after it becomes famous, and the artist is left without any of this.
This could be a good idea if normal contract law cannot handle this in an efficient manner (drawing up and enforcing a fair contract for those sort of rights to future profits for every sale of every work of art would be pretty obnoxious transaction, so the free market's prerequisite of "low transaction costs" does not apply) and that this law can make it more efficient (which is at least theoretically not impossible). If successful we avoid an economic inefficiency with regards to an underproduction of valuable artwork and everybody wins.
I wouldn't necessarily trust Slashdot to tell you what conditions are like in the field.
You'll get a lot more horror stories just because horror stories are more interesting
and worth posting.
I graduated school, got a good job, am pretty well-paid, and my working hours are 40
hours a week period (in the "please go home, you've been working too much" sense).
Of course, I'm good at what I do, had lots of preprofessional experience (summer internships),
and during my normal working hours I work hard.
(That said, teaching is good. Though at the primary/secondary levels, I'd be willing to bet it's more exhausting for a lot less money, if those things matter to you.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry. I should be more clear here. I'm not trying to be anti-military, but at the same tome: no, the military is not a productive part of society. They produce nothing of everyday value, or pretty close to it. Rather, it's a protective part of society. This is important too, but at the end of the day the whole reason for the Army/Navy/whatever is to keep whatever I'm doing (and my neighbors and their neighbors) intact. If all the "bad guys" in the world turned good in a torrent of peace and flowers and sunshine and unicorns heralding the dawn of a new era free from conflict forever, we'd be better off without any troops whatsoever. In the interim, it's good to have them around, but every resource that we devote to the military is diverted from productive activity, and the things people really value in their everyday lives: manufacturing, programming, literature, textiles, art, car-washing, gardening, home improvement, gym memberships, football, education, books on tape, whatever.
Moreover, I'm much better at programming than soldiering. My time really is better spent outside the army. It's the basic principle of "specialization" which Adam Smith expounded upon in Wealth of Nations tens of decades ago. Sure, some people can benefit from their career in the military life, plenty. Some people can appreciate the military culture. I'm not among them. I would find it oppressive, grating, and obnoxious, and probably feel trapped. I've got an ingrained anti-authoritarian streak a mile wide, which I prefer to avoid activating.
Finally, if everyone spends some of the formative years of their lives in a very rigid, structured organization like the military, we as a society would trend towards an organizational monoculture in the rest of our business world which would hamper our ability to innovate and create more-efficient business processes, just because everyone has been inculcated the same way.
Now, my family has plenty of military tradition. I can appreciate the military. My great-grandfather was a hero in the Polish-Bolshevik war. (He got a snazzy estate on the border, and he and his family were set for life, until the Soviets rolled in and shipped everyone off to Siberia). My grandfather on the other side of the family trained to operate a Davy Crockett missile (you know, the "atomic hand grenade"). And now my little brother is thinking of going into the Army. Voluntarily. He'd have a blast, I'm sure. He'd like it. He's a lot better suited for it than I am. The nation will be adequately protected without the government telling me exactly what I'm going to do with 4-6 years of my life.
And you know, in times of great need, like the big world wars, when we have a draft, sometimes that little infringement is a price that people have to pay, and it's worth it. But now? For the sake of airline security to possibly theoretically maybe help thwart a terrorist attack like the one that was just the other day thwarted without that sort of help? Not worth it. Call me again when there's a real threat to America. Thanks.
That's a really expensive way to do it - in terms of opportunity cost. Those are years of peoples' lives. They could be doing something else, being productive members of society, living their lives (some of the best years of their life, too). In terms of lost wages alone that service would easily cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars - to say nothing of the price of my liberty.
Just dismiss any investigation of it as backwards or some form of vapid tree-hugging, don't study it, and ignore any problems until peoples' expected lifespan returns to 35!
Yeah. What sort of an antisocial jerk is going to subscribe to that twitter feed and sift through a bunch of names of people they've never heard of on the off chance that they run into a neighbor?
No, it isn't. First, his employing university told Galileo that teaching this sort of bleeding-edge science, some of which was outright wrong (including, for instance, his theory of the tides, and his characterizations of pendulums), and furthermore wildly contrasted with the current philisophical-scientific consensus. If you were the dean and your faculty started teaching the Electric Universe, you might be concerned too, even if those kooks ended up being right in another 200 years. Then when he wrote a book on the matter and Urban VIII asked him to try and go for a neutral point of view on things (a la Wikipedia's design standards, perhaps) he called the Pope's geocentrism guy "Simplicio" and made him look like an idiot. Bad political move. Then Urban acted like a typical 17th-century Italian nobleman - if anything, probably he was somewhat mild for that archetype.
A tragedy of politics and underdeveloped notions of scientific rigor in the extant culture, but cults hade nothing to do with it.
The neural interface seemed to me like the sort of thing that's unlikely to spontaneously evolved. As one of those flying critters, what does it buy me? A couple of guys come by every once in a while and have a chance of making me their mind slave? No thanks, I'll pass. Therefore, I propose that the entire planet was designed as the retirement community for a highly advanced civilization (the civilization itself retiring, more so than individual members) - much more fun doing it this way than becoming a bunch of brainless eloi. The glimpses into their self-reported histories aren't entirely consistent with this, but the matter could be hidden from casual view.
Ruby gems? PHP Pears? Python pies?
FTFY.
Uh-huh... Your ad hominem attack would be cuter if it were accurate.
And sorry about vague references to economists at large. Don Boudroux and Russell Roberts certainly think that inflation is understated (due to substitution and quality effects). Roberts thinks it's off as much as 1.6% a year (or about 50% wrong if inflation is 3%). I don't think CPI understatement was one of the 40 questions in Whaples' Is There Consensus among American Labor Economists? or anything like that, regrettably.
First, we seem to disagree over the basic definition of the word "productivity". I'm using a definition like "the rate at which something is produced" (note the common root in 'produce' and 'production') - in this case, corporate profits. You're using a definition like "the time spent doing labor". This is a rather unconventional metric of productivity, I think.
Second, you might think that I'm defending the current regime as completely fair and righteous. I'm not. I'm just saying that the sort of attacks that are being made against it aren't particularly sound, even if they address real issues.
I can't say that all CEOs are compensated fairly. It's almost certain that many exist which are compensated unfairly. There may be inefficiencies in the current market for CEOs - goodness knows the transaction costs for the guys are pretty darned high. Like many economic inefficiencies, the winners (CEOs) are few but the gains are concentrated; there is great incentive for them to chase that money. The losers (shareholders) are many and their individual stakes small; there is less incentive to chase down that money. This might be one of the more interesting differences in the democratization of the stock markets, compared to the days when the super-super-wealthy were the people who owned big companies. I haven't studied it much, though. Would probably make a snazzy research topic in economic history.
In any event, a good CEO is almost certainly many times more productive than an average programmer. A bad CEO may be counterproductive, but has convinced somebody (the board) that he's worth paying millions. I've seen good management in action, and I realize the value they are capable of bringing to the company, and I don't think a vicious categorical denouncement is appropriate (or all that effective at effecting change, for that matter).
We can debate the relative merits of the real value of the minimum wage at another time but, in the interim, in the interests of accuracy, for a slightly less anecdotal analysis of the relative value of the US dollar, see MeasuringWorth.com (which suggests $8.48/hr as an equivalent minimum wage, not $17.50, based on the consumer price index). That's a lot closer to par.
I believe most economists suggest that the CPI slightly-overstates inflation by failing to make any adjustment for increases in product quality (things squeezable ketchup bottles instead of glass, or music on an iPod instead of a Walkman, or safer cars less likely to kill you in an accident).
This sort of analysis of the business is pretty shallow and based more on emotion and prejudice more than reality and facts. I don't think it's utterly beyond belief that a good CEO can make deals with other bigwigs and boost the company's bottom line at least 200x as much as an average worker can. Furthermore, I think you seem to be conflating the portion of value which is created by the corporate structure (and its access to capital, and its ability to shoulder risk, and its stability in being there for its clients, and its economies of scale) with "exploitation of the worker" (which still may be present, but is probably less than what you're making it out to be).
But then, I suppose I'm wasting my breath: who would ever want to sully political rhetoric with a modicum of rational thought when dealing with a nuanced issue?
Software that's finished in finite time? (Forever-finished, not just this-release-finished.)
What a concept! Exactly what segment of the industry are you working in over there? If my organization stopped development for a year or two just to sell the existing stuff, our competitors would soon crush us handily.
For the medium-wigs: Just how much do you think you could get away with embezzling? You probably don't have *that* great of access to funds. And do you really think the bigwigs don't have people watching you pretty carefully when you're trying to make off with company money?
For the not-so-big-wigs: Do you even have access to embezzling money?
Mod parent up. If you can map between the "inside" and the "outside" of your organization you can drop packets coming from the outside just as readily.
House Hears Testimony On Football, Head Injuries
It's like a whole 'nother country.
When they released the Enron emails for that particular court case, the academics had a field day: behold! a real live data set of emails. It was useful for the study of text mining techniques: throw some algorithms at it and see the emails automatically classified into categories, and then look and see that this category has all the fantasy-football, and this one has the defraud-the-shareholders, and this other one....
For example, consider the following. Say bad things about PHP all you want (it deserves it) but one of the things you don't generally see with PHP code is a buffer overflow, where you try to copy a bunch of strings and concatenate them together and you run out of room and don't notice it and you go clobbering memory. That's because the string manipulation code goes through a bunch of checks when you're appending strings. You can't just skip these checks and hope that everything will work the same. You may know that such and such a code-path isn't going to need all the bounds checking because you're, say, idunno, assembling fixed-length ZIP+4 codes or something, but the scripting language can't be informed of that fact using any extant mechanism (nor is it clear how you could integrate such a mechanism with the powerful abstraction that lets you not worry about the rest of your strings to begin with).
Moreover, as has already been pointed out, a lot of the computational price of rendering a web page is database queries and memory-cached-object queries which employ compiled code already. The string-manipulation overhead isn't all that significant compared to the abstraction that it buys you. It's probably a better idea to track down logic issues, where your code does stupid useless computations that it doesn't need that make it slow, or could do certain computations in advance to make it faster, or such.
I think there's a lot more potential for interesting machine optimization of code for things coming from the functional paradigm, where you can mathematically show the equivalence of certain portions of code with its optimized replacement, and that this paradigm will be making a resurgence in some places during the upcoming era of 128-core processors. This might be interesting.
Yeah! We could call it "the Sun".
Nope. We just assume that taking away the multimillion-dollar monopoly incentive won't have any effect on pharmaceutical developments and the drugs available (outside of patents) for your children's generation, or even your generation when you retire in 40 years. No effect whatsoever.
I mean, come on, dude, is a little bit of a balanced perspective on a nuanced issue too much to ask?
The case is for fine artists whose early paintings might be sold to a gallery for a couple hundred dollars and is ultimately resold for $10 million after it becomes famous, and the artist is left without any of this.
This could be a good idea if normal contract law cannot handle this in an efficient manner (drawing up and enforcing a fair contract for those sort of rights to future profits for every sale of every work of art would be pretty obnoxious transaction, so the free market's prerequisite of "low transaction costs" does not apply) and that this law can make it more efficient (which is at least theoretically not impossible). If successful we avoid an economic inefficiency with regards to an underproduction of valuable artwork and everybody wins.
In theory, anyway.
Tea. Darjeeling. First flush. FTGFOP. Hot.
and Picard is a commie stooge ;)
How many apps do you have?
How many apps do you have that do direct hardware access?
I wouldn't necessarily trust Slashdot to tell you what conditions are like in the field. You'll get a lot more horror stories just because horror stories are more interesting and worth posting.
I graduated school, got a good job, am pretty well-paid, and my working hours are 40 hours a week period (in the "please go home, you've been working too much" sense). Of course, I'm good at what I do, had lots of preprofessional experience (summer internships), and during my normal working hours I work hard.
(That said, teaching is good. Though at the primary/secondary levels, I'd be willing to bet it's more exhausting for a lot less money, if those things matter to you.)