Also I think the Solaris code licensing fialure is do to the fact it wasn't an open project which would have allowed a "community" to be built around improving and enhancing Solaris.
Yea, I'm waiting for the California-style blame shift. You know, the press release with McNeally saying:
"Oh yes, we tried open source. It failed miserably, because open source just doesn't work." (soundbite inserted for easy PHB digestion; open, read and repeat 500 times)
Then the UNIXland PHBs have their ammo to say no to open source in their companies. (Hopefully, this will lead to more tech PHBs living in homeless shelters, and more 1950s culture companies going over the brink.)
That's why I said "technically" - according to the rules of the market, they made a profit, which is still remarkable considering the economy, the total disruption of the tech sector, where Redhat came from, what Redhat sells, etc.
Whether or not this decision was right, it's NOT good news for web users.
Perhaps, though I don't see how the Court could have found otherwise. Consider that they did decide that the freelancer's property could be confiscated without payment - what ugly precent could this have established?
Faced with that alternative, I'd have to believe that recognizing their property as such, and allowing them to rightfully negotiate the reuse of that property via contract with the publisher was the correct resolution. Which leads me to ask, per the cnn article:
Justices Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens dissented.
What on earth were they thinking? I've been noticing these two dissenting on nearly everything associated with individual liberty, free speech, property rights, etc. I'll have to read the minority opinion to figure that out.
In fact the only surprise here is that Souter (worst appointee in the 20th century) isn't in the mix of dissenters. What did he find right with the majority?
You're not the only one. We turned ours off - after trying digital cable for a year only to realize that the overused complaint about "500+ channels of nothing" was horribly true.
It was amusing, however, turning in the digital cable boxes but keeping the cable modem and phone service (which also comes thru the cable line). The cable provider didn't know what to do!
The fellow at the counter who I returned the boxes to thought at first I must be a "disconnected for nonpayment" - since NO ONE returns their cable tv voluntarily. He looked up in puzzlement and said "But... your account is fine!"
Then he figured I must be moving, and wondered where the cable modem was. He couldn't understand that I was keeping that but not the TV. He had to ask a supervisor how to credit the return of the digital TV converters but not the cable modem - and in fact told me I'd have to buy it so they could resolve the account.
The final proof of their confusion was when they disconnected my TV... by chopping the wire in back of my house (immediately killing the live phone and cable modem). A lengthy discussion with the customer service supervisor indicated that they simply don't have a process contingency for people who want phone and Internet, but not TV.
Yes, you're not doing your part for society if you're not staring at TV advertisements every evening! ("Don't make me tape those eyeballs to the screen!")
*scoove*
Re:"Boredom and Ignorance" are MODERN problems
on
Yo - Pay Attention!
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· Score: 2
Who is more ignorant, a 2001 teen who knows where all the weapons caches are in Quake III, but thinks food comes from grocery stores
It fascinates me at how readily most people allow themselves to become "layer-dependent" - e.g. only operable at the top layer of the OSI model (to borrow the abstraction) and completely, intentionally ignorant at any lower level.
Whether its food ("hamburger comes from the grocery, not the cow"), energy production ("ban nuclear/coal/oil! hey, who turned off the lights?"), or just the minimal maintenance activities around the house and yard, they're horribly overspecialized and useless should they lose their lower-layer support. It is interesting to note that the same process of specialization appears to go hand-in-hand with a detachment from processes of reason (is there some straying from reason and encouragement of relativism that must happen to facilitate such specialized dependency?)
It's interesting to note that these extremely "climatically" dependent creatures usually go away during any period of hardship - e.g. economic depression (just like a drought kills off the weak). It's hard to rationalize food on the table that doesn't exist.
I'd have to agree with you that Katz's assessment of pre-electron era boredom is horribly naive at best, and more likely intentionally misleading. Given the dawn to dusk labor ritual of the era, there wasn't time to sit around and get bored. Then again, most of our references come either from depression-era ethics or colonial expansion ethics. Visit the decaying societies in Europe of the same period and you'll find the same boredom and societal suicide that Katz alludes to.
Instead of media-induced ADD, a generation of baby boomer parents who demanded nothing of their children (other than to be their friends) is a more probable cause.
Per the rest of Katz's post, did you sense the total rambling and general lack of coherence? From mind-reading lights in school to "focusing on the actual needs of the customer" statements of obviousness, I'm afraid ol' Katz is losing it.
Bravo - wish I could mod++ and post at the same time. Insightful, at a minimum. Then again, I'm biased.
It's mystifying to listen to slashdotters rant and rave about their hatred of Microsoft corporate conspiracies, and then turn on their principles and kiss up to the same forces in other industries. They whine about PHB corporate behavior, then act just as ignorant when they run to the supermarket and make horribly foolish assumptions and embarrassing simplifications.
Our city folk slashdotters need to step back and consider for a moment what would happen if their city didn't have its daily food shipments from the the distributors who control their survival. (Yes, you are 0wned, but not by who you think).
Do a mental inventory of what's in the fridge and where it came from - and try to survive on what came from within your city limits.
Hungry yet?
We hear Katz rant about how the McDonalds culture poisons America, but where did he get his groceries at? (Care to reply for once on a post, Katz, or still hiding from any sort of discussion?)
Yea, I'm ranting alright. Hopefully I can stir up enough slashdotters so they won't go hungry. The other side of the force doesn't need to worry about its food supply.
I just showed this article to a soybean farmer friend of mine (5500+ acres in southwest Iowa).
Besides not being surprised that the government would spend its billion dollar defense network on spying on the little guy, he pointed out how amusing it was that all this energy is going into protecting the government's crop insurance stake while the farmer is slowly slipping into oblivion.
(And before some city fool posts an obnoxious, ignorant post about crop subsidies and all the government waste, let me point out that these guys can't stand it either - but faced with government protection of wholesale monopolies that name their price for crops in ebay fashion, that subsidy means the difference between them eeking out a pathetic survival and you having nothing on your dinner plate).
Record low crop prices, record high fuel and fertilizer prices and the whole mess about GMOs (resulting in international boycotts of US produced foods, using GMO as an excuse for nationalistic crop protection) are encouraging the die hards to get out of the business. Heck, in the state of Washington, they're considering paying apple producers to simply destroy orchards. They can't affect the wholesalers, so they'll affect you at home (while the wholesalers rake in even more dollars).
It'll backlash, certainly. Consumers are engineering the beginnings of a California energy crisis in the agriculture markets by choosing to destroy their producers. Just like the greens in CA successfully killed off electricity production, protection of ag distribution monopolies combined with other factors will ensure prohibitively expensive foods in 10-15 years.
So yes, the big guy is doing well. He's smart - greasing both parties at the same time (Microsoft's recently corrected error). He's also getting a great return on his investment, especially if the world's greatest military is now working for him by spying on the serfs in the fields.
You're going to get just what the big guy wants you to buy, at the price he names. Groceries at 40%+ of your income just around the corner...
*scoove*
p.s. If you want to do something about it, support the open source of agriculture. Go down to your local farmer's market this weekend and buy food there. Slashdotters claim to hate Microsoft, yet support the Microsoft of agriculture every time they go to the big grocery store. BUY DIRECT - better, fresher, honest food!
How does it work if a decision in a big company for a _new_ DB system (usually for a special purpose project) has to be made?
I'll tell you how I've seen it done in telecom. You sit around in one meeting after another, gathering a fantasy list of user requirements, only to discover that the sponsor blew their budget and expected the IT department to cover the costs.
Then, when you get to the sticker shock, you get questions like:
"What's the $250K for? Licenses? For what? Database software? Can't you just write something? After all, what's all that development time for if you're just going to go out and buy stuff from Oracle? Why are you paying all those programmers and database people if you're just going to buy it anyways?"
By that time, open source is looking to be the only option that'll come close to the user's budget. True, you've got the developers, and probably the time (wait in line), but without the funds for the big budget commercial database, open source sure beats writing from scratch.
Plus, I've yet to meet a commercial database that came pre-constructed to do exactly what I need to do for telecom billing, so it's assumed that you'll be conducting a good amount of development on the system regardless of its origin.
But please folks, stop dreaming that RH will eat away the piece of the big guys in the upperscale solution market.
No. Microsoft already has done that. In too many vertical markets, Oracle/IBM are not adding any value. At least Microsoft doesn't charge you nearly as badly based on use. (Vendors: Take a hint. Charge me on use and you'll guarantee I'll be looking for a way to get rid of you as I grow!)
Per the previous example, I've tired of Oracle quotes that demand:
- extra per processor
- extra if you're going to use the data on the Internet somehow (even if it is interfacing a Microsoft SQL server first, which is talking to the web via IIS and Oracle never sees a public IP)
- a huge chunk of change for maintenance (aka bug fixes)
Then again, it's not easy to make Larry Ellison wealthier than Gates...
You're also right that PostgresQL and other open source varients can't touch Oracle's very high end capabilities. Their stuff is "trivial" (thanks Clayton Christensen for the model), and is the only thing the very, very high end customers (5%) of Oracle can use. The other 95% do just fine with the open source alternatives.
ROTFL - yea, the welcome image is a...er... trip. Wow. Took another look... that image better not pop up at inopportune times!
Another poster mentioned the proof of the guarantee. To be fair, the only proof I've seen is people truly internalizing it and the personal success they've seen. That's about as unscientific of a causal relationship as they come.
Still, for Keirsey 'rational' temperament (which the technical world probably sees a greater representation of), objectivism is about the most effective operating system to run.
I'm still trying to see the theory applied to non-intellectuals to determine the extent of its application.
Regardless of theory, however, the greatest lesson many can come away from in this downturn is that the only job insurance is your own competence. Now if we could just ensure this rule got applied to the PHBs...
I played that game for the past couple of years - being a PHB-enabler. Things like:
- working 80+ hrs/week (no weekend free-time either) to restructure the god-awful business plan written by clowns so the PHBs could get that critical $50 mil to keep *their* business alive.
- fighting millions tossed at worthless vendors for every little PHB fantasy, like a $2.5 million "system to automatically download call records from a switch and change their format so it can go into the billing system" - that I replaced with a $2,000 Linux box, ftp and grep, only to see the stuff bought anyways and put on my budget while the PHB got a free trip to Disney on the vendor's behalf (never mind that theirs never did work despite several visits by just-out-of-college $225/hour techs).
- solving PHB-induced crisis after crisis with no fanfare, often using my own funds, contacts, whatever, only to prove to the PHBs that their incompetence has no consequence
Imagine their horror during layoffs when I walked over to a fully functional company I own that afternoon (hey, I saw the writing on the wall a half-year in advance).
I'd swear, they were mad at not getting the satisfaction of my agony. Somehow, they feel the need for people like us to suffer so they can rationalize that they're somehow of value.
It's time to destroy the PHBs. Withdraw your expertise. Don't give them your minds. Don't enable their parasitism. Brilliant tech people are a direct threat - we represent intelligence and reason. Don't underestimate or think for a second that they aren't threatened by us and seek our destruction.
Instead, be accountable for yourself - either contracting, consulting or building your own company with other competent people. Work only with other competents; don't enable or empower these parasites. It's time to slay the PHB culture.
And if they have excess skills, they are "too expensive".
This seems to be the tip of the iceberg in a major anti-tech backlash - probably consistent with the "irrational exhuberance" against solid techs in the stock market.
I've been dealing with private company funding (yea, nice timing, eh?) and have had to deal with a consistent thread: technical people are making too much money.
Mind you, I'm paying a CCIE and RF expert $75K, a CTO $85K and the CEO is still under $100K - for a growing startup with good performance and a team with exceptional industry experience (these people are starters as well - commandos who build, operate and manage with solid backgrounds doing this before). These wages, which would be considered poverty levels in the tech industry a year ago, are only marginally balanced to the recepients by their equity.
Yet I'm hearing frequent whines from prospective individual investors about "how horribly overpaid the technical people are" by an alleged factor of double (this coming in many cases from old money, and Wharten MBA grads, mind you!). There's also the frequent reference to how technical people really shouldn't have equity stakes, since they "don't understand the business the way an MBA would."
In other words, the establishment is having its counter-revolution and working with great vigor to counteract the impact technology has had in creating new wealth (and disrupting the social order).
Since I hopefully gave you enough reasons why not to consider your ISP project, and there are probably still people that would go ahead and jump the cliff anyways, let me pass along a few recommendations gained from first-hand lessons:
- Get a good team: Technical knowledge is valuable enough to get you a job working for someone else. Underestimate the business side and die poor. Your team should have commando-type persons (able to wear many hats, think, plan, implement, document, support, etc.) of backgrounds including angel-funding (you're going to need a lot more $$$ than you think), finance, marketing, product development, telecom operations, network support, etc. Configuring a BSD box or a Cisco router is one of about 20+ mandatory competencies you've got to have.
- Write a business plan: You may think you're wasting time that you could be using to implement, but absent a plan, you most likely will never see any outside investment and will certainly die a quick death. You can bet your competitor will have one.
- Get into the angel circuit: Start pitching that plan and evangelize your business. Whoever your CEO-type is had better plan on staying out of the tech and being full-time in front of investors, media, etc.
- Plan on a quick exit or death: Your national competitors have very deep pockets and can bleed you quickly. They can raise the capital thru public markets, bonds, etc. to buy that unreachable $2 million hardware upgrade that'll take 5 years to recover, causing your customers to flee to them for better product/service. Your only hope is to capture initial customers and plan on selling for (hopefully) a nice multiple. Forget about becoming the next Worldcom... you're more likely to die from being eaten alive by a pack of starving squirrels.
Incidentally, mention to a prospective angel investor that you plan on running the company until you retire, building it to a major national powerhouse, and handing control to your kids to run is a surefire way to get blacklisted in the circuit. These people want to get a return on their investment in no more than a year or two in most cases, so unless you're going the same direction, they'll certainly avoid your deal.
- Get people that have done this before (successfully). There's nothing in this business like experience.
- (Last but certainly not least) Build a personal financial buffer that'll allow you to be unemployed for 3+ months. Odds are in this business that it'll happen to you.
and of course the $40 a month just to light the fiber. Internet access by most companies will be between $7-15,
Seems like someone's got the model backwards. Last-mile transport for $40? ISP service (including customer service, billing, Internet egress at broadband rates, mail accounts, etc.) as low as $7? You can't even find outsourced customer service for less than $2.50/mo. per sub.
Isn't fiber optic nearly free? (Kidding, though from reading all those futurists blathering about DWDM and how it'll make fiber nearly infinite, the resultant cost per subscriber nearly = $0). Why then $40 for that free fiber, unless it's for administrative costs (not surprising when offered by a quasi-governmental entity). You're being fooled, tho, when the folks are quoting you $7-$15 for the "rest of the stuff".
with phone service for another $10, and cable for about the same.
OK; obviously someone is confused. Basic rate phone for $10? Try closer to $20, then add all your taxes and charges and it's closer to $35+.
No *LEC would touch you for $7/mo, even if the last mile was free. They'd probably look for no less than $12-$15 given these conditions, and still have to tack on the taxes and other fees.
Meaning cable, broadband internet, and phone service for $75 combined.
More like $150 combined.
As for the uplink, our county has several connections to Bonneville Power's NoahNet, which is federally owned.
And you think they'll let a region of broadband residential customers dump into their network? Free IP egress for broadband ISPs only running DNS? If they did, your telecom companies would have litigation fired in no time.
Maybe I'm misreading this, but where does a federal gov power entity get off buying an OC3 or more of resale bandwidth, even if they do resell it (a cost I didn't see mentioned)?
The Pud is basically leasing out the excess capacity of these lines they are installing.
As Level3's horribly poor stock price can tell you, there's a lot more to a network than optical transport stuck in the ground.
Also, the project isn't proposed to be finished by 2005, much to the dismay of many people out here.
What's the complaint? Socialized medicine in the U.K. means waiting 5 years for knee surgery. Better get used to those lines if you're demanding others pay for your access.
Unlike other people's claims, we do know what technology is, we aren't Amish or anything like that.
I don't know... the whole thing does sound rather collectivist and redistributionist. Stealing money from other people's pockets in far away states (taxpayers and ratepayers funding that Federal power program, for example) to get cheap Internet access? Pay your own way, thank you!
1) What would be the best way to set myself up as an ISP on this fiber connection, since people would mainly just be needing the DNS services (local ISP's are going to charge by the gigabit of bandwidth used).
Initial answer: ROTFL
Serious answer: I see this question on/. periodically and can't figure out why the telecom business gets this while we don't see the "I want to run a power/railroad/airline/whatever business from my basement" posts here too. What do you know about engineering commercial WANs? Backoffice ISP operations? Telecom billing? Regulatory issues?
Your comment about "just needing to offer DNS" provides good perspective on how you shouldn't be doing this. What about customer service? Billing? Collections? Where's your traffic going to terminate? Insurance?
Incidentally, you mention usage-based billing (other local ISPs charging by GB used). How many national ISPs do you see doing this? Are you prepared to shell out several hundred $K (minimum) to buy the software, systems and such to handle this accounting from Netflow or whatever your source? Does your market even support it? (usage-based for resi?)
What setups would you recommend, (I already intend to use BSD) and what all would I need to do it successfully.
Buy an ISP that does it successfully:-)
Sorry for being direct, but after seeing enough people get fleeced by ISP vendors out there looking for targets like you, I'd encourage you to use your money for better purposes.
I saw enough people put second mortgages on their homes to buy Ascend Pipelines back in the mid-90s, thinking that was their key to riches (Step 1. Buy Pipeline Max. Step 2. ? Step 3. Make big money!), only to be thrown out when the house was taken away and the cars repo'ed.
Or just return the DVD's back to the retailer you bought it from.
If they don't clearly say on the package that they're crippleware and it won't run in your equipment, take it back. Having dealt with consumer electronic retailers (from a manufacturer's perspective), significant returns annoy the heck out of the retailer and dent the vendor's credibility. E.g. "Quit shipping us these broken DVDs!"
Don't forget as well that each return probably takes the DVD vendor four or five successful sales to make up for, so a return of 10 crippled DVDs eats the profitability of 40-50 units. That'll hurt if it catches on.
This seems to be more of a rant of a high-schooler...
Actually, I enjoyed the post and felt it brought up some interesting perspectives. Even though I may not agree with the solution, I think the topic is timely and relevant, and the problem identified an important one.
I've always been puzzled with people's identity-seeking quests, especially when they take the cloning approach (e.g. adopting a packaged identity presented for them, either through commercial sources as referenced by the top-down approach, or through other sources - i.e. clubs, gangs, etc.)
Yea, I was the kid in high school who hung out with the jocks, geeks, etc. and found each of them interesting for what they offered, while being somewhat puzzled at my lack of belongingness to any group. In retrospect, I'd bet that the diversity of experiences I gained by not being identity-locked was greater than that of a die-hard clique member.
Now that I've got two young kids, it's even more of a puzzle to me. How do you let them know that perhaps the happiest path is the one where no identity is borrowed? Perhaps it's a function of taking the best from each, and tossing the rest?
Do we need a bottom-up borrowed identity, vs. the top-down commercial ones? Why is this external definition of our personality and lifestyle so important?
Salon and other publications have talked about the rise in libertarianism in recent years. In spite of the Limbaugh complaints about rotten schools (yea, he's interesting sometimes but he's of a definite different branch in the tree), literacy in the US continues to improve, college attendence, though possibly dropping off a bit right now, is much higher than ever before.
You can argue that any and all of these have no corrolation with intelligence or individualism. But looking at individual expression as a barometer - regardless of the accuracy or 'correctness' of that expression - would indicate that we're in a stage of self-expression and individualism never before seen.
Acceptance of broader sexual preferences, body art, etc. all seem to corrolate with increased individualism. Increased intelligence...? Hard to match, other than referencing literacy and other factors.
In fact, there may be an argument that individualism is slightly out of whack due to a near total disregard in the urban areas for community ethics. Ask someone in my neighborhood to turn down a house-shaking subwoofer-to-the-max car stereo and you'll be taking your life into your own hands (from personal experience).
Fair call - hope that might provide some substance!
how about using some of that new-fangled hypertext
Sounds fair! Here are some solutions that would work, unlike the destruction of individual choice approach Katz advocates:
- Eat Locally - Make a goal for yourself. 10%? 25%? more? Try it for a month and see if you can hack it. It's not easy, but certainly worthwhile.
- Promote natural genetic diversity and redundancy in your garden - Centralized buying from major wholesalers like Lamb-Weston promotes at most two or three genetic varieties in potatos, one in soybeans, etc. Garden with the varieties that have been forgotten.
- Buy local foods - visit the local weekly farmer's market. Find area local foods organizations. Get better produce, picked ripe by family farms in your area.
- Consume simplier, healthier beverages - Know how much waste water and byproduct is created through double-stage fermentation (i.e. making beer)? Drink a better beverage - locally produced hard cider! (An added advantage is that most locally produced cider uses a major variety of apples - mostly kinds you'd never find at the supermarket - and promotes additional natural genetic diversity).
Unlike Katz's Soviet vision, the above can and does work, as long as you're not too stupid or lazy.
- labor: how much do you cost an hour? Take your average IT professional in the midwest making $40K to $60K annually. Factor a half hour of cooking and post-eating cleanup (not including the time you walked thru the grocery, drove there and back, etc. to get the stuff - I'll figure you did that with the other groceries and have no cost additional), and you've added anywhere between $10 and $15 to your cost.
Now, if you/like/ cooking (as I do), that's an entirerly different matter.
- convenience: Do you run home to the kitchen for lunch, or swing by the McDonalds near the office? More time savings and the food is ready within the one-hour lunch break timeframe most of us have. Plus, how many friends want to go to your house and eat stuff out of your fridge? Mine trust McDonalds more:-)
I agree tho that if you don't mind the hassel, eating home is a much better deal.
JonKatz's latest collectivist essay brings up the usual plethora of half-truths, hidden assumptions and pleasant sounding nonsense.
Some questions for Mr. Katz per his latest dissertation:
1. You write: Technology, as futurists like George Orwell... will be the battleground on which the fight against corporatism is played out.
Where did Orwell write of the evils of corporatism? Much of his work associated the primary evil with the state, which is your proposed savior your writings. Doesn't Orwell instead argue the opposite perspective?
2.The United States has become a corporate republic...
Really? With a federal government that is at the largest percentage of GNP ever? Or did you mean to write that the US was founded to support individuals and corporate entities but is no longer?
with the takeover of cyberspace one of that republic's primary goals
As defined and substantiated where? By the former liberal administration (who is the doer of no wrong in your writings) giving the green light to NSI and Verisign dominance? Ever look at whose Senate re-elections and presidential runs SAIC significantly funded?
3.Fast food is central to urban and suburban sprawl and to the rise of malls as retailing forces...
Cart before the horse problem. Your model would indicate that McDonalds and other fast food entities moved to empty fields, and by their presence, created housing developments around them per this inaccurate sprawl model.
Better (and significantly substantiated) models show sprawl directly corrolated with white urban flight and a perceived ethic system clash between work ethic-focused european whites and welfare-system nonwhites (e.g. fleeing crime and perceived value difference with a counter ethic model propped up by liberal dependency programs).
Interestingly, McDonalds and other fast food entities have numerous outlets in urban locations. Shouldn't this encourage sprawl too? The theory sounds nice, but is fundamentally flawed.
4.Fast food has created a generation of new, mostly lousy jobs
Fast food has created a generation of ENTRY LEVEL jobs, employing large amounts of unskilled labor. While it'd be nice to pretend that every unskilled high school kid could be paid $150,000 a year at Katz's law firm, I'd seriously doubt the firm would hire them.
Katz, where do you wish unskilled kids to be employed in your imaginary system? Will you hire them at attorney living wages? Why not?
5.cemented the divisions between rich and poor
How? Absent substantiation (typical), where is this found? I visit a suburban McDonalds and see rich and poor alike. Same with small town McDonalds. Same with urban McDonalds. What it has cemented is a collection of consumers who wish to find consistant food of known experiential quanties.
Look at the explosion of catagory killers - essentially the "Super Sizing" of the McDonalds model. Why has Walmart, Best Buy, Chilis, Barnes & Nobel, Lowes, Home Depots, etc, dominated? Because consumers can identify the brand regardless of location and associate it with a certain expection of quality and performance.
This obviously works both ways - have a crummy experience at one Kmart and you'll probably avoid all Kmarts.
6.It's the stepchild of post-war progress in farming, slaughtering and packing, refrigeration and transportation.
There's the comment of a preppy snot who's never been to the country. Want to know why family farms have died and everything from hogs to soybeans have scaled to such large extremes? Look at commodity prices. The only way you can survive now is on scale. Your government created this monster through subsidies, combined with the unnatural centralization of economic power in cities (again, due in many parts to collectivist redistribution of money from the taxpayer base to the wards of the welfare state).
(Side note: There's a reason what you people call flyover space is now known as "red space" - i.e. voting in many cases over 80-90% for Bush. People who grow crops know that all the wishes and intents in the world don't make the crop grow. Hard work, actions, and man's reason puts food on the table.)
Granted, centralization of production in urban areas during the industrial era had its toll too.
7.political activists were already warning about the McDonaldization of America in much the same way that hackers, programmers and open source advocates are sounding the alarm about the Microsoft-ing of the Net. Those activists sensed that the emerging fast food business threatened independent companies and presaged a food economy dominated by giant corporations
And all of this was accomplished through the choices made by individual consumers. Unless you can point to a federal directive ordering consumers to buy Microsoft products and ban competitors, there's no conspiracy other than individual preference.
The same goes for McDonalds and any other chain or category killer.
The fundamental assumption you make but fail to explain is that your solution must require removing this individual choice.
In order to deny people from choosing McDonalds, someone (i.e. the government) must prevent individual determination. How do you wish to go about this in a democratic society, Mr. Katz? (Obviously, you don't, but somehow can't find the courage to clearly explain your support of tyranny).
8.The industry was one of the first to use technology -- especially advances in genetics --
I'll strongly agree that GMO experimentation is troublesome and worrisome. Interestingly, much of this experimentation was initiated under federal research funding (e.g. USDA). Absent standards for what is and isn't acceptable (i.e. the normal role of government), and with tacit government support for GMO, are you surprised that individual interest has evolved along these lines?
9. attracted a disproportionate number of immigrant, poor and minority workers...
Spoken like a true class warrior, who'd rather see unemployed and starving immigrants rather than working and upward bound ones. After all, who's handing out the goods to the unemployed, vs. who's working and discovering how much social security, taxes and such steal from their paycheck?
who have little real chance of advancement
Why is it an employer's job to advance a worker absent a change in qualifications? If I've hired you to flip burgers because you have the qualifications (have pulse, bathe, show up for work on time, follow instructions), then why should I make you a manager absent any other changes in your qualifications?
Again, Katz, you're slopping over some serious assumptions. If promotion is independent of a worker's qualification for the position, let's quit wasting time and hire everyone as six-figure trial attorneys. (Actually, most uneducated immigrants would probably do better than your run of the mill trial attorney, due to their possession of morals and ethics).
10.The fast food industry also perfected, even nationalized, the notion of false courtesy --
And the alternative is.... ?
"Yea, this is Burger King. What the hell did you expect, asshole. You gonna order today? No, you can't have it your way!"
Let's see that operation last a week. Katz, as odd as it seems that you'd be surprised by this (and be hunting for corporate conspiracies as to why McDonalds is nice to its customers), what else to you suggest?
OVERALL - You don't want individuals to have the freedom to choose McDonalds. WHAT IS THE ALTERNATIVE?
- You don't want McDonalds being nice to its patrons. WHAT IS THE ALTERNATIVE?
- You don't want product innovation, consistant and identifiable quality. WHAT IS THE ALTERNATIVE?
Why is it I see a line at an unnamed Soviet store where rude government workers yell at me to take what they're selling today or leave?
Thankfully, the success of fast food, category killers and such are living proof that people like you are parasites living on borrowed time. The net and the rise of intelligent individualism marks the end of your kind.
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Well, we have a $LITTLE_NUMBER support contract with Cisco, and have had similar with two previous companies.
Our results were much the same. Very, very responsive people.
I have to agree with Taco, if they gave this kind of service down at the DMV, they'd be picking up passed out folks left and right.
*scoove*
Also I think the Solaris code licensing fialure is do to the fact it wasn't an open project which would have allowed a "community" to be built around improving and enhancing Solaris.
Yea, I'm waiting for the California-style blame shift. You know, the press release with McNeally saying:
"Oh yes, we tried open source. It failed miserably, because open source just doesn't work." (soundbite inserted for easy PHB digestion; open, read and repeat 500 times)
Then the UNIXland PHBs have their ammo to say no to open source in their companies. (Hopefully, this will lead to more tech PHBs living in homeless shelters, and more 1950s culture companies going over the brink.)
*scoove*
That's why I said "technically" - according to the rules of the market, they made a profit, which is still remarkable considering the economy, the total disruption of the tech sector, where Redhat came from, what Redhat sells, etc.
*scoove*
Technically, RedHat is making money from Linux, and they're not charging per-seat on the software.
No fence sitting there...
*scoove*
Whether or not this decision was right, it's NOT good news for web users.
Perhaps, though I don't see how the Court could have found otherwise. Consider that they did decide that the freelancer's property could be confiscated without payment - what ugly precent could this have established?
Faced with that alternative, I'd have to believe that recognizing their property as such, and allowing them to rightfully negotiate the reuse of that property via contract with the publisher was the correct resolution. Which leads me to ask, per the cnn article:
Justices Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens dissented.
What on earth were they thinking? I've been noticing these two dissenting on nearly everything associated with individual liberty, free speech, property rights, etc. I'll have to read the minority opinion to figure that out.
In fact the only surprise here is that Souter (worst appointee in the 20th century) isn't in the mix of dissenters. What did he find right with the majority?
*scoove*
You're not the only one. We turned ours off - after trying digital cable for a year only to realize that the overused complaint about "500+ channels of nothing" was horribly true.
It was amusing, however, turning in the digital cable boxes but keeping the cable modem and phone service (which also comes thru the cable line). The cable provider didn't know what to do!
The fellow at the counter who I returned the boxes to thought at first I must be a "disconnected for nonpayment" - since NO ONE returns their cable tv voluntarily. He looked up in puzzlement and said "But... your account is fine!"
Then he figured I must be moving, and wondered where the cable modem was. He couldn't understand that I was keeping that but not the TV. He had to ask a supervisor how to credit the return of the digital TV converters but not the cable modem - and in fact told me I'd have to buy it so they could resolve the account.
The final proof of their confusion was when they disconnected my TV... by chopping the wire in back of my house (immediately killing the live phone and cable modem). A lengthy discussion with the customer service supervisor indicated that they simply don't have a process contingency for people who want phone and Internet, but not TV.
Yes, you're not doing your part for society if you're not staring at TV advertisements every evening! ("Don't make me tape those eyeballs to the screen!")
*scoove*
Who is more ignorant, a 2001 teen who knows where all the weapons caches are in Quake III, but thinks food comes from grocery stores
It fascinates me at how readily most people allow themselves to become "layer-dependent" - e.g. only operable at the top layer of the OSI model (to borrow the abstraction) and completely, intentionally ignorant at any lower level.
Whether its food ("hamburger comes from the grocery, not the cow"), energy production ("ban nuclear/coal/oil! hey, who turned off the lights?"), or just the minimal maintenance activities around the house and yard, they're horribly overspecialized and useless should they lose their lower-layer support. It is interesting to note that the same process of specialization appears to go hand-in-hand with a detachment from processes of reason (is there some straying from reason and encouragement of relativism that must happen to facilitate such specialized dependency?)
It's interesting to note that these extremely "climatically" dependent creatures usually go away during any period of hardship - e.g. economic depression (just like a drought kills off the weak). It's hard to rationalize food on the table that doesn't exist.
I'd have to agree with you that Katz's assessment of pre-electron era boredom is horribly naive at best, and more likely intentionally misleading. Given the dawn to dusk labor ritual of the era, there wasn't time to sit around and get bored. Then again, most of our references come either from depression-era ethics or colonial expansion ethics. Visit the decaying societies in Europe of the same period and you'll find the same boredom and societal suicide that Katz alludes to.
Instead of media-induced ADD, a generation of baby boomer parents who demanded nothing of their children (other than to be their friends) is a more probable cause.
Per the rest of Katz's post, did you sense the total rambling and general lack of coherence? From mind-reading lights in school to "focusing on the actual needs of the customer" statements of obviousness, I'm afraid ol' Katz is losing it.
*scoove*
Bravo - wish I could mod++ and post at the same time. Insightful, at a minimum. Then again, I'm biased.
It's mystifying to listen to slashdotters rant and rave about their hatred of Microsoft corporate conspiracies, and then turn on their principles and kiss up to the same forces in other industries. They whine about PHB corporate behavior, then act just as ignorant when they run to the supermarket and make horribly foolish assumptions and embarrassing simplifications.
Our city folk slashdotters need to step back and consider for a moment what would happen if their city didn't have its daily food shipments from the the distributors who control their survival. (Yes, you are 0wned, but not by who you think).
Do a mental inventory of what's in the fridge and where it came from - and try to survive on what came from within your city limits.
Hungry yet?
We hear Katz rant about how the McDonalds culture poisons America, but where did he get his groceries at? (Care to reply for once on a post, Katz, or still hiding from any sort of discussion?)
Yea, I'm ranting alright. Hopefully I can stir up enough slashdotters so they won't go hungry. The other side of the force doesn't need to worry about its food supply.
*scoove*
Not true - though wouldn't it be nice if life was this simple?
Visit one crop insurer I've dealt with - American Agrisurance - and learn how it's not so simple.
After a massive battle to keep you from getting a lousy $300 back per individual, you should know that the government likes to keep its money.
*scoove*
I just showed this article to a soybean farmer friend of mine (5500+ acres in southwest Iowa).
Besides not being surprised that the government would spend its billion dollar defense network on spying on the little guy, he pointed out how amusing it was that all this energy is going into protecting the government's crop insurance stake while the farmer is slowly slipping into oblivion.
(And before some city fool posts an obnoxious, ignorant post about crop subsidies and all the government waste, let me point out that these guys can't stand it either - but faced with government protection of wholesale monopolies that name their price for crops in ebay fashion, that subsidy means the difference between them eeking out a pathetic survival and you having nothing on your dinner plate).
Record low crop prices, record high fuel and fertilizer prices and the whole mess about GMOs (resulting in international boycotts of US produced foods, using GMO as an excuse for nationalistic crop protection) are encouraging the die hards to get out of the business. Heck, in the state of Washington, they're considering paying apple producers to simply destroy orchards. They can't affect the wholesalers, so they'll affect you at home (while the wholesalers rake in even more dollars).
It'll backlash, certainly. Consumers are engineering the beginnings of a California energy crisis in the agriculture markets by choosing to destroy their producers. Just like the greens in CA successfully killed off electricity production, protection of ag distribution monopolies combined with other factors will ensure prohibitively expensive foods in 10-15 years.
So yes, the big guy is doing well. He's smart - greasing both parties at the same time (Microsoft's recently corrected error). He's also getting a great return on his investment, especially if the world's greatest military is now working for him by spying on the serfs in the fields.
You're going to get just what the big guy wants you to buy, at the price he names. Groceries at 40%+ of your income just around the corner...
*scoove*
p.s. If you want to do something about it, support the open source of agriculture. Go down to your local farmer's market this weekend and buy food there. Slashdotters claim to hate Microsoft, yet support the Microsoft of agriculture every time they go to the big grocery store. BUY DIRECT - better, fresher, honest food!
How does it work if a decision in a big company for a _new_ DB system (usually for a special purpose project) has to be made?
I'll tell you how I've seen it done in telecom. You sit around in one meeting after another, gathering a fantasy list of user requirements, only to discover that the sponsor blew their budget and expected the IT department to cover the costs.
Then, when you get to the sticker shock, you get questions like:
"What's the $250K for? Licenses? For what? Database software? Can't you just write something? After all, what's all that development time for if you're just going to go out and buy stuff from Oracle? Why are you paying all those programmers and database people if you're just going to buy it anyways?"
By that time, open source is looking to be the only option that'll come close to the user's budget. True, you've got the developers, and probably the time (wait in line), but without the funds for the big budget commercial database, open source sure beats writing from scratch.
Plus, I've yet to meet a commercial database that came pre-constructed to do exactly what I need to do for telecom billing, so it's assumed that you'll be conducting a good amount of development on the system regardless of its origin.
But please folks, stop dreaming that RH will eat away the piece of the big guys in the upperscale solution market.
No. Microsoft already has done that. In too many vertical markets, Oracle/IBM are not adding any value. At least Microsoft doesn't charge you nearly as badly based on use. (Vendors: Take a hint. Charge me on use and you'll guarantee I'll be looking for a way to get rid of you as I grow!)
Per the previous example, I've tired of Oracle quotes that demand:
- extra per processor
- extra if you're going to use the data on the Internet somehow (even if it is interfacing a Microsoft SQL server first, which is talking to the web via IIS and Oracle never sees a public IP)
- a huge chunk of change for maintenance (aka bug fixes)
Then again, it's not easy to make Larry Ellison wealthier than Gates...
You're also right that PostgresQL and other open source varients can't touch Oracle's very high end capabilities. Their stuff is "trivial" (thanks Clayton Christensen for the model), and is the only thing the very, very high end customers (5%) of Oracle can use. The other 95% do just fine with the open source alternatives.
*scoove*
ROTFL - yea, the welcome image is a...er... trip. Wow. Took another look... that image better not pop up at inopportune times!
Another poster mentioned the proof of the guarantee. To be fair, the only proof I've seen is people truly internalizing it and the personal success they've seen. That's about as unscientific of a causal relationship as they come.
Still, for Keirsey 'rational' temperament (which the technical world probably sees a greater representation of), objectivism is about the most effective operating system to run.
I'm still trying to see the theory applied to non-intellectuals to determine the extent of its application.
Regardless of theory, however, the greatest lesson many can come away from in this downturn is that the only job insurance is your own competence. Now if we could just ensure this rule got applied to the PHBs...
*scoove*
C'mon their rates for Network operations staff is less than most people make flipping burgers
True; I still laugh at the response I get to that point:
"Well, that's what training is for!"
Sounds like it's a good time to get that HR certification...
*scoove*
Bravo!!!
I played that game for the past couple of years - being a PHB-enabler. Things like:
- working 80+ hrs/week (no weekend free-time either) to restructure the god-awful business plan written by clowns so the PHBs could get that critical $50 mil to keep *their* business alive.
- fighting millions tossed at worthless vendors for every little PHB fantasy, like a $2.5 million "system to automatically download call records from a switch and change their format so it can go into the billing system" - that I replaced with a $2,000 Linux box, ftp and grep, only to see the stuff bought anyways and put on my budget while the PHB got a free trip to Disney on the vendor's behalf (never mind that theirs never did work despite several visits by just-out-of-college $225/hour techs).
- solving PHB-induced crisis after crisis with no fanfare, often using my own funds, contacts, whatever, only to prove to the PHBs that their incompetence has no consequence
Imagine their horror during layoffs when I walked over to a fully functional company I own that afternoon (hey, I saw the writing on the wall a half-year in advance).
I'd swear, they were mad at not getting the satisfaction of my agony. Somehow, they feel the need for people like us to suffer so they can rationalize that they're somehow of value.
It's time to destroy the PHBs. Withdraw your expertise. Don't give them your minds. Don't enable their parasitism. Brilliant tech people are a direct threat - we represent intelligence and reason. Don't underestimate or think for a second that they aren't threatened by us and seek our destruction.
Instead, be accountable for yourself - either contracting, consulting or building your own company with other competent people. Work only with other competents; don't enable or empower these parasites. It's time to slay the PHB culture.
*scoove*
Click here for a guaranteed cure for unemployment
And if they have excess skills, they are "too expensive".
This seems to be the tip of the iceberg in a major anti-tech backlash - probably consistent with the "irrational exhuberance" against solid techs in the stock market.
I've been dealing with private company funding (yea, nice timing, eh?) and have had to deal with a consistent thread: technical people are making too much money.
Mind you, I'm paying a CCIE and RF expert $75K, a CTO $85K and the CEO is still under $100K - for a growing startup with good performance and a team with exceptional industry experience (these people are starters as well - commandos who build, operate and manage with solid backgrounds doing this before). These wages, which would be considered poverty levels in the tech industry a year ago, are only marginally balanced to the recepients by their equity.
Yet I'm hearing frequent whines from prospective individual investors about "how horribly overpaid the technical people are" by an alleged factor of double (this coming in many cases from old money, and Wharten MBA grads, mind you!). There's also the frequent reference to how technical people really shouldn't have equity stakes, since they "don't understand the business the way an MBA would."
Suggested retail price for techies?
CCIE: $45K
Wireless Engineer: $30K
Network Operations Staff: $6/hr
In other words, the establishment is having its counter-revolution and working with great vigor to counteract the impact technology has had in creating new wealth (and disrupting the social order).
*scoove*
Since I hopefully gave you enough reasons why not to consider your ISP project, and there are probably still people that would go ahead and jump the cliff anyways, let me pass along a few recommendations gained from first-hand lessons:
- Get a good team: Technical knowledge is valuable enough to get you a job working for someone else. Underestimate the business side and die poor. Your team should have commando-type persons (able to wear many hats, think, plan, implement, document, support, etc.) of backgrounds including angel-funding (you're going to need a lot more $$$ than you think), finance, marketing, product development, telecom operations, network support, etc. Configuring a BSD box or a Cisco router is one of about 20+ mandatory competencies you've got to have.
- Write a business plan: You may think you're wasting time that you could be using to implement, but absent a plan, you most likely will never see any outside investment and will certainly die a quick death. You can bet your competitor will have one.
- Get into the angel circuit: Start pitching that plan and evangelize your business. Whoever your CEO-type is had better plan on staying out of the tech and being full-time in front of investors, media, etc.
- Plan on a quick exit or death: Your national competitors have very deep pockets and can bleed you quickly. They can raise the capital thru public markets, bonds, etc. to buy that unreachable $2 million hardware upgrade that'll take 5 years to recover, causing your customers to flee to them for better product/service. Your only hope is to capture initial customers and plan on selling for (hopefully) a nice multiple. Forget about becoming the next Worldcom... you're more likely to die from being eaten alive by a pack of starving squirrels.
Incidentally, mention to a prospective angel investor that you plan on running the company until you retire, building it to a major national powerhouse, and handing control to your kids to run is a surefire way to get blacklisted in the circuit. These people want to get a return on their investment in no more than a year or two in most cases, so unless you're going the same direction, they'll certainly avoid your deal.
- Get people that have done this before (successfully). There's nothing in this business like experience.
- (Last but certainly not least) Build a personal financial buffer that'll allow you to be unemployed for 3+ months. Odds are in this business that it'll happen to you.
*scoove*
and of course the $40 a month just to light the fiber. Internet access by most companies will be between $7-15,
/. periodically and can't figure out why the telecom business gets this while we don't see the "I want to run a power/railroad/airline/whatever business from my basement" posts here too. What do you know about engineering commercial WANs? Backoffice ISP operations? Telecom billing? Regulatory issues?
Seems like someone's got the model backwards. Last-mile transport for $40? ISP service (including customer service, billing, Internet egress at broadband rates, mail accounts, etc.) as low as $7? You can't even find outsourced customer service for less than $2.50/mo. per sub.
Isn't fiber optic nearly free? (Kidding, though from reading all those futurists blathering about DWDM and how it'll make fiber nearly infinite, the resultant cost per subscriber nearly = $0). Why then $40 for that free fiber, unless it's for administrative costs (not surprising when offered by a quasi-governmental entity). You're being fooled, tho, when the folks are quoting you $7-$15 for the "rest of the stuff".
with phone service for another $10, and cable for about the same.
OK; obviously someone is confused. Basic rate phone for $10? Try closer to $20, then add all your taxes and charges and it's closer to $35+.
No *LEC would touch you for $7/mo, even if the last mile was free. They'd probably look for no less than $12-$15 given these conditions, and still have to tack on the taxes and other fees.
Meaning cable, broadband internet, and phone service for $75 combined.
More like $150 combined.
As for the uplink, our county has several connections to Bonneville Power's NoahNet, which is federally owned.
And you think they'll let a region of broadband residential customers dump into their network? Free IP egress for broadband ISPs only running DNS? If they did, your telecom companies would have litigation fired in no time.
Maybe I'm misreading this, but where does a federal gov power entity get off buying an OC3 or more of resale bandwidth, even if they do resell it (a cost I didn't see mentioned)?
The Pud is basically leasing out the excess capacity of these lines they are installing.
As Level3's horribly poor stock price can tell you, there's a lot more to a network than optical transport stuck in the ground.
Also, the project isn't proposed to be finished by 2005, much to the dismay of many people out here.
What's the complaint? Socialized medicine in the U.K. means waiting 5 years for knee surgery. Better get used to those lines if you're demanding others pay for your access.
Unlike other people's claims, we do know what technology is, we aren't Amish or anything like that.
I don't know... the whole thing does sound rather collectivist and redistributionist. Stealing money from other people's pockets in far away states (taxpayers and ratepayers funding that Federal power program, for example) to get cheap Internet access? Pay your own way, thank you!
1) What would be the best way to set myself up as an ISP on this fiber connection, since people would mainly just be needing the DNS services (local ISP's are going to charge by the gigabit of bandwidth used).
Initial answer: ROTFL
Serious answer: I see this question on
Your comment about "just needing to offer DNS" provides good perspective on how you shouldn't be doing this. What about customer service? Billing? Collections? Where's your traffic going to terminate? Insurance?
Incidentally, you mention usage-based billing (other local ISPs charging by GB used). How many national ISPs do you see doing this? Are you prepared to shell out several hundred $K (minimum) to buy the software, systems and such to handle this accounting from Netflow or whatever your source? Does your market even support it? (usage-based for resi?)
What setups would you recommend, (I already intend to use BSD) and what all would I need to do it successfully.
Buy an ISP that does it successfully:-)
Sorry for being direct, but after seeing enough people get fleeced by ISP vendors out there looking for targets like you, I'd encourage you to use your money for better purposes.
I saw enough people put second mortgages on their homes to buy Ascend Pipelines back in the mid-90s, thinking that was their key to riches (Step 1. Buy Pipeline Max. Step 2. ? Step 3. Make big money!), only to be thrown out when the house was taken away and the cars repo'ed.
*scoove*
Or just return the DVD's back to the retailer you bought it from.
If they don't clearly say on the package that they're crippleware and it won't run in your equipment, take it back. Having dealt with consumer electronic retailers (from a manufacturer's perspective), significant returns annoy the heck out of the retailer and dent the vendor's credibility. E.g. "Quit shipping us these broken DVDs!"
Don't forget as well that each return probably takes the DVD vendor four or five successful sales to make up for, so a return of 10 crippled DVDs eats the profitability of 40-50 units. That'll hurt if it catches on.
*scoove*
This seems to be more of a rant of a high-schooler...
Actually, I enjoyed the post and felt it brought up some interesting perspectives. Even though I may not agree with the solution, I think the topic is timely and relevant, and the problem identified an important one.
I've always been puzzled with people's identity-seeking quests, especially when they take the cloning approach (e.g. adopting a packaged identity presented for them, either through commercial sources as referenced by the top-down approach, or through other sources - i.e. clubs, gangs, etc.)
Yea, I was the kid in high school who hung out with the jocks, geeks, etc. and found each of them interesting for what they offered, while being somewhat puzzled at my lack of belongingness to any group. In retrospect, I'd bet that the diversity of experiences I gained by not being identity-locked was greater than that of a die-hard clique member.
Now that I've got two young kids, it's even more of a puzzle to me. How do you let them know that perhaps the happiest path is the one where no identity is borrowed? Perhaps it's a function of taking the best from each, and tossing the rest?
Do we need a bottom-up borrowed identity, vs. the top-down commercial ones? Why is this external definition of our personality and lifestyle so important?
*scoove*
Obviously it's a Katz imposter. Proof?
o less than ten thousand words
o total lack of angst-ridden hatred of success
o support of a commercial product
Fair criticism.
Salon and other publications have talked about the rise in libertarianism in recent years. In spite of the Limbaugh complaints about rotten schools (yea, he's interesting sometimes but he's of a definite different branch in the tree), literacy in the US continues to improve, college attendence, though possibly dropping off a bit right now, is much higher than ever before.
You can argue that any and all of these have no corrolation with intelligence or individualism. But looking at individual expression as a barometer - regardless of the accuracy or 'correctness' of that expression - would indicate that we're in a stage of self-expression and individualism never before seen.
Acceptance of broader sexual preferences, body art, etc. all seem to corrolate with increased individualism. Increased intelligence...? Hard to match, other than referencing literacy and other factors.
In fact, there may be an argument that individualism is slightly out of whack due to a near total disregard in the urban areas for community ethics. Ask someone in my neighborhood to turn down a house-shaking subwoofer-to-the-max car stereo and you'll be taking your life into your own hands (from personal experience).
Fair call - hope that might provide some substance!
*scoove*
how about using some of that new-fangled hypertext
Sounds fair! Here are some solutions that would work, unlike the destruction of individual choice approach Katz advocates:
- Eat Locally - Make a goal for yourself. 10%? 25%? more? Try it for a month and see if you can hack it. It's not easy, but certainly worthwhile.
- Promote natural genetic diversity and redundancy in your garden - Centralized buying from major wholesalers like Lamb-Weston promotes at most two or three genetic varieties in potatos, one in soybeans, etc. Garden with the varieties that have been forgotten.
- Buy local foods - visit the local weekly farmer's market. Find area local foods organizations. Get better produce, picked ripe by family farms in your area.
- Consume simplier, healthier beverages - Know how much waste water and byproduct is created through double-stage fermentation (i.e. making beer)? Drink a better beverage - locally produced hard cider! (An added advantage is that most locally produced cider uses a major variety of apples - mostly kinds you'd never find at the supermarket - and promotes additional natural genetic diversity).
Unlike Katz's Soviet vision, the above can and does work, as long as you're not too stupid or lazy.
*scoove*
Nice points, except you missed two:
/like/ cooking (as I do), that's an entirerly different matter.
- labor: how much do you cost an hour? Take your average IT professional in the midwest making $40K to $60K annually. Factor a half hour of cooking and post-eating cleanup (not including the time you walked thru the grocery, drove there and back, etc. to get the stuff - I'll figure you did that with the other groceries and have no cost additional), and you've added anywhere between $10 and $15 to your cost.
Now, if you
- convenience: Do you run home to the kitchen for lunch, or swing by the McDonalds near the office? More time savings and the food is ready within the one-hour lunch break timeframe most of us have. Plus, how many friends want to go to your house and eat stuff out of your fridge? Mine trust McDonalds more:-)
I agree tho that if you don't mind the hassel, eating home is a much better deal.
*scoove*
Exactly what do you think the Nato countries were doing with all their bombers and attack choppers and ground troops?
:-)
That wasn't a war. It was a peace action, brought to you in part by the fine folks at NATO.
Anyway, wars aren't cool anymore (unless they've been filmed by Disney). Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, etc.
Maybe that's why the "no warring nations with McDonalds" model holds true?
*scoove*
JonKatz's latest collectivist essay brings up the usual plethora of half-truths, hidden assumptions and pleasant sounding nonsense.
... will be the battleground on which the fight against corporatism is played out.
Some questions for Mr. Katz per his latest dissertation:
1. You write: Technology, as futurists like George Orwell
Where did Orwell write of the evils of corporatism? Much of his work associated the primary evil with the state, which is your proposed savior your writings. Doesn't Orwell instead argue the opposite perspective?
2. The United States has become a corporate republic...
Really? With a federal government that is at the largest percentage of GNP ever? Or did you mean to write that the US was founded to support individuals and corporate entities but is no longer?
with the takeover of cyberspace one of that republic's primary goals
As defined and substantiated where? By the former liberal administration (who is the doer of no wrong in your writings) giving the green light to NSI and Verisign dominance? Ever look at whose Senate re-elections and presidential runs SAIC significantly funded?
3. Fast food is central to urban and suburban sprawl and to the rise of malls as retailing forces...
Cart before the horse problem. Your model would indicate that McDonalds and other fast food entities moved to empty fields, and by their presence, created housing developments around them per this inaccurate sprawl model.
Better (and significantly substantiated) models show sprawl directly corrolated with white urban flight and a perceived ethic system clash between work ethic-focused european whites and welfare-system nonwhites (e.g. fleeing crime and perceived value difference with a counter ethic model propped up by liberal dependency programs).
Interestingly, McDonalds and other fast food entities have numerous outlets in urban locations. Shouldn't this encourage sprawl too? The theory sounds nice, but is fundamentally flawed.
4. Fast food has created a generation of new, mostly lousy jobs
Fast food has created a generation of ENTRY LEVEL jobs, employing large amounts of unskilled labor. While it'd be nice to pretend that every unskilled high school kid could be paid $150,000 a year at Katz's law firm, I'd seriously doubt the firm would hire them.
Katz, where do you wish unskilled kids to be employed in your imaginary system? Will you hire them at attorney living wages? Why not?
5. cemented the divisions between rich and poor
How? Absent substantiation (typical), where is this found? I visit a suburban McDonalds and see rich and poor alike. Same with small town McDonalds. Same with urban McDonalds. What it has cemented is a collection of consumers who wish to find consistant food of known experiential quanties.
Look at the explosion of catagory killers - essentially the "Super Sizing" of the McDonalds model. Why has Walmart, Best Buy, Chilis, Barnes & Nobel, Lowes, Home Depots, etc, dominated? Because consumers can identify the brand regardless of location and associate it with a certain expection of quality and performance.
This obviously works both ways - have a crummy experience at one Kmart and you'll probably avoid all Kmarts.
6. It's the stepchild of post-war progress in farming, slaughtering and packing, refrigeration and transportation.
There's the comment of a preppy snot who's never been to the country. Want to know why family farms have died and everything from hogs to soybeans have scaled to such large extremes? Look at commodity prices. The only way you can survive now is on scale. Your government created this monster through subsidies, combined with the unnatural centralization of economic power in cities (again, due in many parts to collectivist redistribution of money from the taxpayer base to the wards of the welfare state).
(Side note: There's a reason what you people call flyover space is now known as "red space" - i.e. voting in many cases over 80-90% for Bush. People who grow crops know that all the wishes and intents in the world don't make the crop grow. Hard work, actions, and man's reason puts food on the table.)
Granted, centralization of production in urban areas during the industrial era had its toll too.
7. political activists were already warning about the McDonaldization of America in much the same way that hackers, programmers and open source advocates are sounding the alarm about the Microsoft-ing of the Net. Those activists sensed that the emerging fast food business threatened independent companies and presaged a food economy dominated by giant corporations
And all of this was accomplished through the choices made by individual consumers. Unless you can point to a federal directive ordering consumers to buy Microsoft products and ban competitors, there's no conspiracy other than individual preference.
The same goes for McDonalds and any other chain or category killer.
The fundamental assumption you make but fail to explain is that your solution must require removing this individual choice.
In order to deny people from choosing McDonalds, someone (i.e. the government) must prevent individual determination. How do you wish to go about this in a democratic society, Mr. Katz? (Obviously, you don't, but somehow can't find the courage to clearly explain your support of tyranny).
8. The industry was one of the first to use technology -- especially advances in genetics --
I'll strongly agree that GMO experimentation is troublesome and worrisome. Interestingly, much of this experimentation was initiated under federal research funding (e.g. USDA). Absent standards for what is and isn't acceptable (i.e. the normal role of government), and with tacit government support for GMO, are you surprised that individual interest has evolved along these lines?
9. attracted a disproportionate number of immigrant, poor and minority workers...
Spoken like a true class warrior, who'd rather see unemployed and starving immigrants rather than working and upward bound ones. After all, who's handing out the goods to the unemployed, vs. who's working and discovering how much social security, taxes and such steal from their paycheck?
who have little real chance of advancement
Why is it an employer's job to advance a worker absent a change in qualifications? If I've hired you to flip burgers because you have the qualifications (have pulse, bathe, show up for work on time, follow instructions), then why should I make you a manager absent any other changes in your qualifications?
Again, Katz, you're slopping over some serious assumptions. If promotion is independent of a worker's qualification for the position, let's quit wasting time and hire everyone as six-figure trial attorneys. (Actually, most uneducated immigrants would probably do better than your run of the mill trial attorney, due to their possession of morals and ethics).
10. The fast food industry also perfected, even nationalized, the notion of false courtesy --
And the alternative is.... ?
"Yea, this is Burger King. What the hell did you expect, asshole. You gonna order today? No, you can't have it your way!"
Let's see that operation last a week. Katz, as odd as it seems that you'd be surprised by this (and be hunting for corporate conspiracies as to why McDonalds is nice to its customers), what else to you suggest?
OVERALL
- You don't want individuals to have the freedom to choose McDonalds. WHAT IS THE ALTERNATIVE?
- You don't want McDonalds being nice to its patrons. WHAT IS THE ALTERNATIVE?
- You don't want product innovation, consistant and identifiable quality. WHAT IS THE ALTERNATIVE?
Why is it I see a line at an unnamed Soviet store where rude government workers yell at me to take what they're selling today or leave?
Thankfully, the success of fast food, category killers and such are living proof that people like you are parasites living on borrowed time. The net and the rise of intelligent individualism marks the end of your kind.
*scoove*
Produce or die.