Regulations have costs. Lower economic growth translates into less science, medicine, culture, opportunity for the less fortunate of the world.
Higher death rates among children world-wide, more AIDS cases and less chance of a cure,...
Even if I buy the 'risk analysis' approach, I don't see how to measure the costs of any intervention in the same scales: would we trade $100,000T in world-wide economic costs due to ignoring a high-risk climatic problem and the $100T costs vs continuing the economic growth and curing cancer, AIDS, providing clean water world-wide, etc.
The point is, this is not mere $ we are talking about, but rather the many long-term advantages that mere $ and associated economic growth bring us as both individuals and as a species.
Is that a climate prediction, or a seasonal weather prediction? Climate is long-term.
As a seasonal weather prediction, you are indeed correct, at least for 199 out of 200 years. (There was a year when all the crops failed, early 1800s, I believe. Snowed in July in New England, due to Krakatoa or some such large volcano.)
Climate what is being argued in the environmental debate, as that affects species. Seasons limit what species can live where (tho the oppossums have been moving North for a long time), but climate changes wipe out species.
If seasons are climate, then you have entirely changed the debate and its import.
These are chaotic systems: the future can't be predicted, not even probablistically.
Therefore, there is no way for a policy to move the system from point A in the state space to point B.
Therefore, we must stop all these organizations from making policy and thereby wasting our $.
This does not prevent us from working to 'save the environment', whether that be species, water sources,...
But we have to be a lot smarter than environmentalists have been. E.g., if you want to save the the California Condor, show that it is amazingly good to eat, then make it part of our diet. Chickens and turkeys won't ever go extinct, not even wild versions.
Saving species is best done by widening human diet: lots of new plant species for vegetarians, condor Thanksgiving dinners,...
This is not the first time this approach to control populations of a pest has been used. It works. Screw worms were a big problem in US agriculture: they layed eggs in any open wound in livestock, e.g. umbilical cord of new-borns. Ugly way for an animal to die, being eaten from the inside.
Rachel Carson approved, and the following specifically recommends their use with Tetse flies: http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkey notes/pm SilentSpring44.asp
There will be 'side-effects', of course. Definition of a system is that "you can't do just one thing". --> wisdom of this is a different issue.
There is no area of engineering or science small enough to be a science. All require large sets of knowledge and experience. All have many dimensions in practice, and approximating an optimal design is equivalent to the search for large state spaces, i.e. NP-complete.
However much science may be involved, the practice of computer science is selecting and applying heuristics. A fine definition of art, I think.
In a SYSTEM, you don't get to choose just one thing.
If we choose a 'war on terrorism', we also choose:
Slower growth of medical technology. (More people die this year from the effects of WWI than at the height of trench warfare.)
Slower growth of the economy. (Lots more poor people, including some reading this.)
Abrogation of Civil Rights on a large scale. (The WOT will make the War on Drugs look benign.)
More terrorism. (The 20th century is a cascade of ever-larger gov solutions to problems caused by the previous gov solution. Terrorism against the US is CAUSED by our government's policies. Switzerland doesn't have a terrorism problem.)
Systems such as our computer systems, or international relations and warfare, are too complex for off-the-cuff analyses, such as those by Jon Katz, to be useful. In fact, Katz wouldn't attempt it for a computer system, and none of us would allow him to pontificate on something he knows so little of.
Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Holland, Monaco,...
don't have terrorist problems.
Empires always have terrorist problems. Empires always fall, no exceptions, and faster and faster as the possible scope of Empire/government has increased.
We have violated our own Constitution, and pissed off a substantial part of the world doing it.
We are a technological civilization -- balanced on a needle tip. Kicking the needle over is easy.
This was the first semi-technical terrorism, and obviously the most effective. Bombs can be built by history and polysci majors. Planes can be flown by anyone who buys Microsoft Flight Simulator and works at it for a while.
God help us if they ever enlist engineers and physicists.
The only possible effective response is to go back to the original view of our government: we defend our shores, we don't screw around with the rest of the world. Abrogate all of our defense treaties, withdraw from the UN, bring the troops home, focus on putting our gov back inside the Constitution.
Otherwise, we will lose our civil rights and add to our terrorism-from-without with terrorism-from-within.
Gillmor is a simplistic moralist. He doesn't have much to contribute to any of these discussions beyond "naughty, naughty businesses, bring in the gov to protect us poor consumers/competitors"
Jon Katz is less predictable.
If you don't like Microsoft (and I don't), then don't buy their software.
Until then, please note that Oracle is far more immoral/unethical/sleezy in the way it treats customers, bribed itself to prominence,...
Accounting is mind-wrenching -- you won't believe their assumptions -- so need to take 2 courses.
You may choose to do a finance course after that, assuming you don't instantly grasp the concept of NPV, and can't re-do the thinking following it in an afternoon or 2.
Immediately, begin reading the WSJ and Forbes. (Forbes isn't a big-company view of life, as Business Week is.)
Read some of the business-oriented pubs in your technical area, and you will soon know as much as the great majority of MBAs.
Marketing is a great game requiring deep understanding, IMHO, but very few people actually grasp the essentials, and so I assume it can't be taught. Don't have advice here.
As an alternative to the MBA, go start a company. You will lose $ the first time, but you can plan so this is less than the cost of a Harvard MBA, and you will learn much more of relevance.
Lew
When you start taking the entire Constitution equally seriously, just as tho it is a design document for a socio-econo-political system, I will take you seriously.
When you understand, and expound on, the system-level effects of these various violations of our design documents, I will take you seriously.
When you show some understanding of ALL of the issues of Civil Rights, I will take you seriously.
Until then, you are just another liberal do-gooder, spouting off on the issue-of-the-day.
A 'no system' view of life. By definition, naive, ineffectual. Worse, following idiots such as yourselves leads to a life of contradictions and surprises ranging from continual annoyances to social catastrophe.
Wonderful example of why the media are so useless. Not a clue about systems, no comprehension of opportunity costs.
8% growth compounded for 20 years solves a lot of social problems.
The power given to gov to solve problems such as Katz discusses has mostly lead to 2% growth rates. The number of deaths these cause, mainly among the poor, children, women, and mainly in the 3rd world that Katz and fellow liberals pretend to champion, is huge.
World War I's effects still kill more people every year than at the height of the war: the war killed a generation of business, scientific and technical brains --> less medicine, technology and economic growth.
The AIDS epidemic around the world is likely due to opportunity costs of WWI.
Gov is the killer, both directly and indirectly, not corporations that provide fast food to voluntary consumers.
So, how does Middle East peace connect to corporations?
I don't have to buy MS products. I do have to 'buy' the services of various gov entities who will use extreme force against me if I don't.
I don't work for a big corporation. We have about 80 people just now.
What corporation hires 11-year olds for 18 cents an hour for 18-hour days? This may have happened in the 1800s at the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Most of the terrible social conditions cited by the left are/were the result of poverty. Corporations make us wealthy, and the terrible social conditions evaporate as they do so.
Trickle-down is the only way it works. Our various social programs have failed to do anything except enrich the bureaucracy and the political class.
The only people who subsist on min wage are kids in their first job (even McDonald's pays more than min wage), those who can't speak English (McDonald's is another exception), or those who have absolutely no skills whatsoever.
I am not selfish. I give lots of $ to people in Russia, for example.
Our "minimum wage poor" are very rich compared to the average person in other countries.
At the same time the left castigates corporations as ever-more-evil, our jobs are better than ever.
Here in Silicon Valley, many companies serve lunch every day, have food in the lunch-room for breakfast and dinner and snacks. Pete's coffee is almost a requirement. Oracle and other big companies have fantastic cafeterias with very low prices.
The fastest-growing big companies treat people better than any previous generation: stock options, maternity leave, great benefits,...
I don't know about Microsoft, but Oracle (a company which I consider much sleazier than MS) treats its people very well.
None of this happened because of leftists agitating. It happened because we became wealthy, and people are now in short supply. It hasn't happened everywhere nor for all talents, but it will.
This line of argument is ideology -- dissociated from actual fact and experience.
How, at the beginning of the 21st century, with the historical landscape littered with 100+M dead from 20th ideological disasters, can we believe that 'idealism' is so wonderful?
How can idiots like Jon Katz continue to be published in engineering-oriented publications like this? Do engineers forget their solid-theory, pragmatic views when they consider politics?
There are very few Jewish drunks, even Russians. Their kids start with wine very early, graduate to vodka in high school, but almost never drink to excess. The culture encourages other behavior.
DARE is just another variety of prohibitionist and cultural engineering thinking. Cultures are too complex to engineer.
Lew
Vote to eliminate the Newtonian world-view
on
Should You Vote?
·
· Score: 1
The whole intellectual basis of modern gov is based on the idea that we can predict the future and therefore we understand the system well enough to change it for the better.
That we can predict the future is false. Chaos and computational complexity prohibit it. We see these work in our everyday lives, in our jobs, and in our gov's actions. We KNOW we can't predict in areas we are most familiar with and in control of, yet we continue, as a mass, to believe.
Even if the prevaling world-view was correct, the methods of affecting the future are ridiculous. As technologists, we know how hard it is to make our complex (but still simple compared to natural systems such as weather, purely social systems such as government/politics, or mixed such as the economy) technological systems work. Every area I have worked in (hardware, software, sysadmin, web) I make a lot of mistakes. Despite having machine assistance in checking our work and extensive testing, we put out buggy systems.
The political process produces 10,000 PAGE bills with NO testing. This approach is ludicrous beyond belief, guaranteed to kill any system.
Yet we continue to support this mass insanity year after year.
People will look back on the last 5 centuries, with their history of ever-increasing scope of gov action and the ever-increasing scale of human tragidy/catastrophy, and find no parallels in human existence. Salem witch trials and the Spanish Inquisition are minor, temporary 'bad hair days' compared to the effects of our Newtonian world-view: clockwork predictable into the far future.
Radically reducing the size, scope, complexity of our gov is the only reason to vote. Anything else perpetuates the mass insanity, responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths in the last century. If it continues, "you ain't seen nothing yet".
1) Forget ideology, idealism, 'fairness',...
We are empiricists who work from the best theory which works in actual practice.
2) The US Constitution is a design document. We have been committing the cardinal sin of re-interpreting the terms on-the-fly as we construct/operate our political-social-economic system. No wonder we are in trouble.
3) Don't attempt to violate nature's laws
in designing and operating social, political, economic systems. E.g., chaos is normal in natural systems -- only requires non-linear equations with feedback. --> A close horizon, beyond which predictions are extremely inaccurate.
If you can't predict, what on earth are you doing prescribing an action to produce a predicted result?
--> Limited gov is an idea with a firm theoretical foundation.
4) Laws are an attempt to program for an open environment. In carefully closed environments (don't change OS, don't change toolset, don't change specs, don't change design,...), after much testing, we can produce moderate-sized systems with relatively few bugs.
Politicians routinely issue 1000+ page laws with NO testing.
5) In our daily lives, managing a household, a small group, a small business,... is a challenge precisely because things (assumptions, requirements, resources, desires) change a lot.
Given all of the above, isn't it pretty ludicrous to expect politicians at any level to be able to do better on their stage than we can on our smaller stages? We have a lot more relevant info about our problems than they do, yet we can't, without constant work and adjustment, make anything really work really well for any period of time.
The solution for politics is to make it much less improtant in our lives. The solution for politicians is to make them must less important, and have many fewer of them.
And get rid of the silly treaty about commercialization of moon, etc.
NASA is like any other gov entity: political decisions, not economic/practical decisions. The shuttle has been a huge failure in the latter terms -- no where close to plan. E.g. turnaround times of 30 days, not 2 days, so expensive we can't build any more,...
Meanwhile, they have closed down each and every private competitor --> the Chinese and Russians are launcing our satallites.
NASA has no economic reasons for existance, and so we haven't been back to the moon in 30 years, we don't have a moon colony as a base for further space exploration,...
However, I just went looking for consulting work here in Silicon Valley. Put my resume up on dice on Thursday, was working Wed AM 13 days later. Five interviews, 3 offers. Took the position of "Software Architect" on a big router project for a startup.
I am 55 years old. Most of my friends have grey hair. Nobody I know complains about discrimination of any kind: we all marvel at how our years of experience translate into top consulting rates. This includes people with Ph.Ds and people with some art classes past high school. All serious technical people for 15+ years, all in great demand.
The company I work at has signs up in the cafeteria: $5000 reward for recommending an engineer who gets hired. They are still way behind the hiring curve. Good company, so far as I can see, good opportunity.
As for "umpteen hours a week": our guys work 9 hours a day just now -- design phase. It is 9 real hours -- heads down, and push all day, go home to the wife and family in the evening. No doubt it will be harder when we get near deadlines.
Most I have to complain about is traffic and the cost of housing.
In case you think this isn't worth it, I have lots of multi-millionaire friends as a result of their few years of hard work. Haven't made it myself yet, but maybe this one. Or maybe my wife will be lucky.
Either way, our resumes get better at 4X the speed of time working for startups.
No doubt, there are asshole managers and idiot companies who treat people bad, especially people who can't quit. Easy solution for those people: work for a company which rents them out as consultants. If they don't like the job, they move to another. I know lots of people who have gotten their green cards this way. I can recommend a company if anyone asks.
BTW: We are hiring. I am not an employee, so no hidden agenda beyond making our project work.
Corporations need to show an after-tax return on the investment to their stockholders.
--> If they pay taxes to the gov, they have to increase pre-tax profit. This results in higher prices for all of us. Also lower investment in new technology,...
We pay the taxes, not the corproations We get the benefit of Cisco's tax-avoidance.
Slashdot Mirror
Regulations have costs. Lower economic growth translates into less science, medicine, culture, opportunity for the less fortunate of the world.
Higher death rates among children world-wide, more AIDS cases and less chance of a cure,
Even if I buy the 'risk analysis' approach, I don't see how to measure the costs of any intervention in the same scales: would we trade $100,000T in world-wide economic costs due to ignoring a high-risk climatic problem and the $100T costs vs continuing the economic growth and curing cancer, AIDS, providing clean water world-wide, etc.
The point is, this is not mere $ we are talking about, but rather the many long-term advantages that mere $ and associated economic growth bring us as both individuals and as a species.
Lew
Is that a climate prediction, or a seasonal weather prediction? Climate is long-term.
As a seasonal weather prediction, you are indeed correct, at least for 199 out of 200 years. (There was a year when all the crops failed, early 1800s, I believe. Snowed in July in New England, due to Krakatoa or some such large volcano.)
Climate what is being argued in the environmental debate, as that affects species. Seasons limit what species can live where (tho the oppossums have been moving North for a long time), but climate changes wipe out species.
If seasons are climate, then you have entirely changed the debate and its import.
Lew
These are chaotic systems: the future can't be predicted, not even probablistically.
Therefore, there is no way for a policy to move the system from point A in the state space to point B.
Therefore, we must stop all these organizations from making policy and thereby wasting our $.
This does not prevent us from working to 'save the environment', whether that be species, water sources,
But we have to be a lot smarter than environmentalists have been. E.g., if you want to save the the California Condor, show that it is amazingly good to eat, then make it part of our diet. Chickens and turkeys won't ever go extinct, not even wild versions.
Saving species is best done by widening human diet: lots of new plant species for vegetarians, condor Thanksgiving dinners,
Lew Glendenning
This is not the first time this approach to control populations of a pest has been used. It works. Screw worms were a big problem in US agriculture: they layed eggs in any open wound in livestock, e.g. umbilical cord of new-borns. Ugly way for an animal to die, being eaten from the inside.
Rachel Carson approved, and the following specifically recommends their use with Tetse flies:
http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monke
There will be 'side-effects', of course. Definition of a system is that "you can't do just one thing". --> wisdom of this is a different issue.
Lew Glendenning
There is no area of engineering or science small enough to be a science. All require large sets of knowledge and experience. All have many dimensions in practice, and approximating an optimal design is equivalent to the search for large state spaces, i.e. NP-complete.
However much science may be involved, the practice of computer science is selecting and applying heuristics. A fine definition of art, I think.
Lew Glendenning
In a SYSTEM, you don't get to choose just one thing.
If we choose a 'war on terrorism', we also choose:
Slower growth of medical technology. (More people die this year from the effects of WWI than at the height of trench warfare.)
Slower growth of the economy. (Lots more poor people, including some reading this.)
Abrogation of Civil Rights on a large scale. (The WOT will make the War on Drugs look benign.)
More terrorism. (The 20th century is a cascade of ever-larger gov solutions to problems caused by the previous gov solution. Terrorism against the US is CAUSED by our government's policies. Switzerland doesn't have a terrorism problem.)
Systems such as our computer systems, or international relations and warfare, are too complex for off-the-cuff analyses, such as those by Jon Katz, to be useful. In fact, Katz wouldn't attempt it for a computer system, and none of us would allow him to pontificate on something he knows so little of.
Lew Glendenning
Baloney. Nobody could defend themselves in the 'weapons-free safety zone' created by FAA regulations and US law.
Consequently, there was an easier killing zone, much larger than ever before.
Abrogation of basic human rights caused this problem. A human should never be denied the ability to defend him/herself.
This is what "shall not be infringed" means.
Lew Glendenning
80 years of playing at empire created the injustices that caused the hatreds.
50 years of victim disarmament laws created yet another weapons-free killing zone that the terrorists used to their advantage.
Increasing freedom is the answer: Put the US government back inside the Constitution. Get out of all of the foreign entanglements.
This is in the US interest: Empires don't last very long in the modern world, and the parent state often disappears along with the empire.
Lew Glendenning
The 5,000 dead are the direct result of creating yet another 'weapons-free zone'.
While intended to produce safety, these stupidities produce killing zones instead.
Lew Glendenning
Switzerland doesn't have a terrorist problem.
Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Holland, Monaco,
don't have terrorist problems.
Empires always have terrorist problems. Empires always fall, no exceptions, and faster and faster as the possible scope of Empire/government has increased.
Seems pretty obvious what to do to me.
Lew
So, they outlaw some sort of crypto.
What penalty to apply?
A fine will deter some behaviors, no doubt.
Serious stuff won't be deterred by less than the penalty for the crime itself.
Clearly, using outlawed crypto requires the death penalty to be applied in all cases.
Right. That will enhance the acceptance of our criminal justice system as being just!
Lew Glendenning
We have violated our own Constitution, and pissed off a substantial part of the world doing it.
We are a technological civilization -- balanced on a needle tip. Kicking the needle over is easy.
This was the first semi-technical terrorism, and obviously the most effective. Bombs can be built by history and polysci majors. Planes can be flown by anyone who buys Microsoft Flight Simulator and works at it for a while.
God help us if they ever enlist engineers and physicists.
The only possible effective response is to go back to the original view of our government: we defend our shores, we don't screw around with the rest of the world. Abrogate all of our defense treaties, withdraw from the UN, bring the troops home, focus on putting our gov back inside the Constitution.
Otherwise, we will lose our civil rights and add to our terrorism-from-without with terrorism-from-within.
Lew
Gillmor is a simplistic moralist. He doesn't have much to contribute to any of these discussions beyond "naughty, naughty businesses, bring in the gov to protect us poor consumers/competitors"
Jon Katz is less predictable.
If you don't like Microsoft (and I don't), then don't buy their software.
Until then, please note that Oracle is far more immoral/unethical/sleezy in the way it treats customers, bribed itself to prominence,
Lew
Accounting is mind-wrenching -- you won't believe their assumptions -- so need to take 2 courses. You may choose to do a finance course after that, assuming you don't instantly grasp the concept of NPV, and can't re-do the thinking following it in an afternoon or 2. Immediately, begin reading the WSJ and Forbes. (Forbes isn't a big-company view of life, as Business Week is.) Read some of the business-oriented pubs in your technical area, and you will soon know as much as the great majority of MBAs. Marketing is a great game requiring deep understanding, IMHO, but very few people actually grasp the essentials, and so I assume it can't be taught. Don't have advice here. As an alternative to the MBA, go start a company. You will lose $ the first time, but you can plan so this is less than the cost of a Harvard MBA, and you will learn much more of relevance. Lew
Jon Katz:
When you start taking the entire Constitution equally seriously, just as tho it is a design document for a socio-econo-political system, I will take you seriously.
When you understand, and expound on, the system-level effects of these various violations of our design documents, I will take you seriously.
When you show some understanding of ALL of the issues of Civil Rights, I will take you seriously.
Until then, you are just another liberal do-gooder, spouting off on the issue-of-the-day.
A 'no system' view of life. By definition, naive, ineffectual. Worse, following idiots such as yourselves leads to a life of contradictions and surprises ranging from continual annoyances to social catastrophe.
Lew
Wonderful example of why the media are so useless. Not a clue about systems, no comprehension of opportunity costs.
8% growth compounded for 20 years solves a lot of social problems.
The power given to gov to solve problems such as Katz discusses has mostly lead to 2% growth rates. The number of deaths these cause, mainly among the poor, children, women, and mainly in the 3rd world that Katz and fellow liberals pretend to champion, is huge.
World War I's effects still kill more people every year than at the height of the war: the war killed a generation of business, scientific and technical brains --> less medicine, technology and economic growth.
The AIDS epidemic around the world is likely due to opportunity costs of WWI.
Gov is the killer, both directly and indirectly, not corporations that provide fast food to voluntary consumers.
Lew Glendenning
So, how does Middle East peace connect to corporations?
I don't have to buy MS products. I do have to 'buy' the services of various gov entities who will use extreme force against me if I don't.
I don't work for a big corporation. We have about 80 people just now.
What corporation hires 11-year olds for 18 cents an hour for 18-hour days? This may have happened in the 1800s at the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Most of the terrible social conditions cited by the left are/were the result of poverty. Corporations make us wealthy, and the terrible social conditions evaporate as they do so.
Trickle-down is the only way it works. Our various social programs have failed to do anything except enrich the bureaucracy and the political class.
Lew
What minimum wage?
People working in 7-11s make $20 an hour here.
The only people who subsist on min wage are kids in their first job (even McDonald's pays more than min wage), those who can't speak English (McDonald's is another exception), or those who have absolutely no skills whatsoever.
I am not selfish. I give lots of $ to people in Russia, for example.
Our "minimum wage poor" are very rich compared to the average person in other countries.
Lew
At the same time the left castigates corporations as ever-more-evil, our jobs are better than ever.
...
Here in Silicon Valley, many companies serve lunch every day, have food in the lunch-room for breakfast and dinner and snacks. Pete's coffee is almost a requirement. Oracle and other big companies have fantastic cafeterias with very low prices.
The fastest-growing big companies treat people better than any previous generation: stock options, maternity leave, great benefits,
I don't know about Microsoft, but Oracle (a company which I consider much sleazier than MS) treats its people very well.
None of this happened because of leftists agitating. It happened because we became wealthy, and people are now in short supply. It hasn't happened everywhere nor for all talents, but it will.
This line of argument is ideology -- dissociated from actual fact and experience.
How, at the beginning of the 21st century, with the historical landscape littered with 100+M dead from 20th ideological disasters, can we believe that 'idealism' is so wonderful?
How can idiots like Jon Katz continue to be published in engineering-oriented publications like this? Do engineers forget their solid-theory, pragmatic views when they consider politics?
Lew Glendenning
There are very few Jewish drunks, even Russians. Their kids start with wine very early, graduate to vodka in high school, but almost never drink to excess. The culture encourages other behavior.
DARE is just another variety of prohibitionist and cultural engineering thinking. Cultures are too complex to engineer.
Lew
The whole intellectual basis of modern gov is based on the idea that we can predict the future and therefore we understand the system well enough to change it for the better.
That we can predict the future is false. Chaos and computational complexity prohibit it. We see these work in our everyday lives, in our jobs, and in our gov's actions. We KNOW we can't predict in areas we are most familiar with and in control of, yet we continue, as a mass, to believe.
Even if the prevaling world-view was correct, the methods of affecting the future are ridiculous. As technologists, we know how hard it is to make our complex (but still simple compared to natural systems such as weather, purely social systems such as government/politics, or mixed such as the economy) technological systems work. Every area I have worked in (hardware, software, sysadmin, web) I make a lot of mistakes. Despite having machine assistance in checking our work and extensive testing, we put out buggy systems.
The political process produces 10,000 PAGE bills with NO testing. This approach is ludicrous beyond belief, guaranteed to kill any system.
Yet we continue to support this mass insanity year after year.
People will look back on the last 5 centuries, with their history of ever-increasing scope of gov action and the ever-increasing scale of human tragidy/catastrophy, and find no parallels in human existence. Salem witch trials and the Spanish Inquisition are minor, temporary 'bad hair days' compared to the effects of our Newtonian world-view: clockwork predictable into the far future.
Radically reducing the size, scope, complexity of our gov is the only reason to vote. Anything else perpetuates the mass insanity, responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths in the last century. If it continues, "you ain't seen nothing yet".
Lew Glendenning
1) Forget ideology, idealism, 'fairness',
We are empiricists who work from the best theory which works in actual practice.
2) The US Constitution is a design document. We have been committing the cardinal sin of re-interpreting the terms on-the-fly as we construct/operate our political-social-economic system. No wonder we are in trouble.
3) Don't attempt to violate nature's laws
in designing and operating social, political, economic systems. E.g., chaos is normal in natural systems -- only requires non-linear equations with feedback. --> A close horizon, beyond which predictions are extremely inaccurate.
If you can't predict, what on earth are you doing prescribing an action to produce a predicted result?
--> Limited gov is an idea with a firm theoretical foundation.
4) Laws are an attempt to program for an open environment. In carefully closed environments (don't change OS, don't change toolset, don't change specs, don't change design,
Politicians routinely issue 1000+ page laws with NO testing.
5) In our daily lives, managing a household, a small group, a small business,
Given all of the above, isn't it pretty ludicrous to expect politicians at any level to be able to do better on their stage than we can on our smaller stages? We have a lot more relevant info about our problems than they do, yet we can't, without constant work and adjustment, make anything really work really well for any period of time.
The solution for politics is to make it much less improtant in our lives. The solution for politicians is to make them must less important, and have many fewer of them.
Lew Glendenning
And get rid of the silly treaty about commercialization of moon, etc.
NASA is like any other gov entity: political decisions, not economic/practical decisions. The shuttle has been a huge failure in the latter terms -- no where close to plan. E.g. turnaround times of 30 days, not 2 days, so expensive we can't build any more,
Meanwhile, they have closed down each and every private competitor --> the Chinese and Russians are launcing our satallites.
NASA has no economic reasons for existance, and so we haven't been back to the moon in 30 years, we don't have a moon colony as a base for further space exploration,
Defund NASA if you want space exploration.
Lew Glendenning
I can't speak for anywhere else in the country.
However, I just went looking for consulting work here in Silicon Valley. Put my resume up on dice on Thursday, was working Wed AM 13 days later. Five interviews, 3 offers. Took the position of "Software Architect" on a big router project for a startup.
I am 55 years old. Most of my friends have grey hair. Nobody I know complains about discrimination of any kind: we all marvel at how our years of experience translate into top consulting rates. This includes people with Ph.Ds and people with some art classes past high school. All serious technical people for 15+ years, all in great demand.
The company I work at has signs up in the cafeteria: $5000 reward for recommending an engineer who gets hired. They are still way behind the hiring curve. Good company, so far as I can see, good opportunity.
As for "umpteen hours a week": our guys work 9 hours a day just now -- design phase. It is 9 real hours -- heads down, and push all day, go home to the wife and family in the evening. No doubt it will be harder when we get near deadlines.
Most I have to complain about is traffic and the cost of housing.
In case you think this isn't worth it, I have lots of multi-millionaire friends as a result of their few years of hard work. Haven't made it myself yet, but maybe this one. Or maybe my wife will be lucky.
Either way, our resumes get better at 4X the speed of time working for startups.
No doubt, there are asshole managers and idiot companies who treat people bad, especially people who can't quit. Easy solution for those people: work for a company which rents them out as consultants. If they don't like the job, they move to another. I know lots of people who have gotten their green cards this way. I can recommend a company if anyone asks.
BTW: We are hiring. I am not an employee, so no hidden agenda beyond making our project work.
Lew Glendenning
Corporations need to show an after-tax return on the investment to their stockholders.
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--> If they pay taxes to the gov, they have to increase pre-tax profit. This results in higher prices for all of us. Also lower investment in new technology,
We pay the taxes, not the corproations We get the benefit of Cisco's tax-avoidance.