I actually advocate a Citizen's Dividend with a baseline of a 224sqft apartment, which includes a refrigerator and bathroom. The model of minimum wage and public aid is outdated and has reached the point of inflicting harm; Citizen's Dividend model is now cheaper, and avoids all the negative consequences of minimum wage and public aid while providing stronger benefits. Minimum wage and public aid was a good system for the 1900s, and impossible in the 1800s; it's not like we've never transitioned from something shitty like no welfare to something shitty like poor houses (jail for poor people, where we make you work but feed you), then to something less-shitty like unemployment insurance and old-age pensions. Time to move forward again.
By the by, as we increase our wealth, more of the total income goes to high-income earners--say you increase production by 10%, "the rich" get 6% of that and "the working class" get 4%, and everyone is better off, just some people more better-off than others. As this gap increases, the additional tax on higher income in a progressive income tax system offsets more of the working-class tax: without raising taxes on the rich, we can lower taxes on the working class. Reducing taxes on the working class is a good thing, because it lowers the cost of labor: without paying so much in taxes, you can maintain the same standard of living on a lower wage; with higher taxes, the standard of living you demand forces an increase in wages. We've developed enough wealth for the large split we see today, with more of the income going to high income earners; arresting the growth of our welfare system will ensure we can scale taxes down instead of scaling expenses up over time, and simultaneously provide an increase in basic standard of living over time forever.
When I left one job that I did a lot of work for, I gave them documentation on all the shit I did. We signed a contract in which they could commission me for up to 80 hours of consulting work over the next 6 months at $37.50/hr and I had to respond, in case they needed support.
Up-front pay is a lot of risk for the client: what if they never use you? They're doing this with 1,000 workers; if severance is 10% of their salary for 1 year, they're paying 100 workers full-time 1 year just in case they need to pull any of them back for any amount of time over the next 2 years. There will likely be a lot of IT workers winning big on this, pulling $10k out of their employer for nothing, and a few getting the shit end of the stick; the employer will likely pay for more work than it uses.
I have a lot of broad domain knowledge and do some of the same, but not with this kind of vigor. The dude's got a lot of *deep* domain knowledge in a lot of broad domains, so can pull more together. In either case, you face some of the same challenges.
The first problem you get is expert bias. Experts tend to filter things, because the brain processes information in such a way as to minimize effort. Using the prefrontal cortex is costly, so the brain uses every other facility to link together structured memories and behave habitually; even your beliefs and primary knowledge are an advanced form of programmed reflex. You can override your habitual behaviors by expending energy to make an analytical decision in the prerfontal cortex, and then apply immense mental effort via the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to direct your brain to do things differently--that's called "willpower", and your reserves of willpower are limited to the exhaustion of your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Ways around this include reprogramming (building new habits) and reframing (associating one behavior with another automatic behavior, so that the internal automatic behavior reduces the amount of willpower required to carry out the associated action).
I've developed a habit of working everything into my models of consistency. To a point, I research everything internally: when given a new fact, I build out from it by using my knowledge resources to explain it fully. I'll run into conflicts, and straighten out my own misconceptions; often, I find that the new fact gives me new information, but also has its own flaws that I must correct using my existing knowledge--this even happens with state-of-the-art knowledge which happens to be wrong, although you'll frequently find non-concrete situations where you need to import more data to decide which set of information is wrong. You become *quite* aware of where your understanding is limited and how to work around your limits doing this. The typical method is to compare the fact to internals, and reject it immediately if it doesn't fit in with your body of knowledge--using the new fact to explain your existing knowledge, rather than using your existing knowledge to explain the new fact.
The second problem you'll encounter is analogy fallacies. Analogies are the single most powerful tool you have. Many domains, ranging from biology to atomic physics to psychology to economics to computer programming, behave in roughly the same model, or roughly the same set of models. Most people miss the "roughly" part, the "set of models" part, or both: they assume any hint of X behaves like Y means X *is* Y and all things related to X have the same relationship and analogous behaviors to all things related to Y and to each other.
If a computer is like a human brain, with its processing facility (CPU), its working memory (RAM), and its long-term storage (secondary memory), then the computer must shuffle things between these like the brain does, and needs to compact and organize and associate its long-term storage while sleeping to operate efficiently, and every 1 and 0 is essentially a neuron, and those bits in RAM interact with each other in strange ways like in the brain... no, no, none of that is true. The computer needs to copy things out of long-term storage into RAM and then push that data through the CPU to perform computations, like a human brain; it doesn't operate in any other way like a human brain or a human body, and has a lot of functions which are quite different.
Get those things right and you can make yourself a quick-and-dirty genius. Not on that level, but impressive enough. The human mind can be trained in all sorts of ways to operate at an extremely high level of intelligence, and it's fairly trivial to turn schools into genius-mills. As I said in the beginning, though, the brain operates by internal reflex and habitual behaviors; you will need a lot of mental energy to rewire your brain into the kind of ridiculously powerful machine a guy like Wood carries around in his skull. Once you do it, it's done; but doing it is... exhausting.
Yeah came here to say this. It's a contract for...? Legally, it's not even a valid contract if you're not exchanging anything; the contract is not valid until an exchange occurs.
If you contract to provide service, and then don't get paid, and so don't provide service, there's no contract. Mind you, if you contract to provide service, agree to back out by a certain date if you can't, then don't provide service, the first exchange is bidding: you provide service, and your client doesn't get anyone else to do it. If your client contracts a second guy as back-up without your informed consent, that's a firing offense, and you fire the client.
This is outgoing IP traffic from the mobile phone, not incoming from outside. Apple is claiming their mobile phone itself is incapable of sending a specific IP packet which another mobile phone can send just fine, unless the application has special permissions.
Apple has claimed it's not vulnerable to e.g. sending IP packets directly to IP addresses if those IP packets are SIP packets, with no substantiation. SIP applications can use TLS as well, making packet inspection difficult.
You assume that, given a land area the size of the earth and a large population, power will not concentrate with individuals, leading to social behaviors producing crime, political arguments, and international interactions which inevitably end in shows of force.
You may as well say you, as a human, have never *wanted* a think your neighbor has, or had sexual desired for another woman before you met or after you married your wife. You may moderate your responses, but they happen; others don't moderate their responses as much.
It is easiest to obtain power by uniting the goals and thinking of a people. It is easiest to increase and retain that power by directing their attention to an external threat and positioning yourself as the source of protection from that threat. Having done so, you can direct their actions to destroy that threat, thus war.
Amusingly enough, they make the fallacious argument that the human is always better in "emergency situations" than the car. That begs the question: why would a human be capable of recognizing and reacting to an emergency situation more quickly and correctly than a computer? If the human can recognize the situation so much better, won't the human avoid the situation entirely in the first place?
Most humans respond to emergency situations by panic braking and trying to steer out of the way, which usually spins the car. Without rigorous driver training in advanced city and highway driving classes provided by Summit Racing or Skip Barber's Racing School--training which ranges $1000-ish for 3 days of 8 hour training blocks--drivers in the US never receive any instruction on threshold braking, steering in emergency situations (with or without anti-lock brakes), skid recovery, suspension system limits (how well your car handles), and defensive driving techniques including active awareness and lane toss exercises (steering instead of panic braking when you can avoid an obstacle you can't brake fast enough to avoid hitting).
Most people just don't have these skills; and many crash into shit while putting on make-up or eating an egg mcmuffin in the car.
You came to rely on it so quickly because it requires less mental energy (finite in supply), so your brain rapidly developed new habits to avoid the expenditure. That allows you to accomplish more elsewhere without needing a recovery period. This system has its ups and downs; people are rabidly defensive of their misguided political positions because it takes a lot of mental energy to refactor them.
It starts, but it dies when it gets 70% through downloading my mailbox.
Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop
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KDE Turns 19
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· Score: 1
I worked at Best Buy around 2005-2006, when eMachines and Gateways were selling for $300-ish, and people were bringing in 6 month old computers and refusing to pay Geek Squad $500 for repairs, and just buying new $300 eMachines with better hard drives. That jump from 200MHz to 800Mhz to 1.5Ghz to 3GHz happened earlier, but the rest of the industry was still catching up for a decade after the gigahertz wars.
I don't use Firefox anymore. Thunderbird is shitty; I've tried switching to Evolution, but it chokes on gmail.
I've been enjoying Gnome 3 for years. Its local menu bars are a refreshing alternative to Ubuntu's stupid global desktop menu thing. I wrote a complete explanation of why top-of-screen menus are stupid--both from a spatial location sense (the menu's position relative to the working space changes when the working space moves on the desktop) and from a multi-window interface sense (you only need one click to activate a window and access its menu bar, versus two and a lot more mouse movement to activate a window and access the global menu bar). I do dislike its alt-tab behavior.
This was true back when Gnome 2 was using 400MB and KDE was using over a gigabyte, and when KDE applications required 10-15 seconds to start up while equivalent or more feature-complete GTK applications loaded in 2-3 seconds? I recall Galleon working much better with my 512MB RAM machine than Konqueror, thanks to not pushing me into swap hell with its ludicrous belief in a multi-hundred-megabyte RSS; to be fair, Opera would run a dozen tabs with a resident set size of 50MB, which I found astounding.
I'd always looked forward to the inevitable KDE migration to GTK+. It never happened. I tend to avoid Qt applications due to their slow loading and bloated memory use, as well as the poor UI standards your typical Qt UI designer uses.
Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop
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KDE Turns 19
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· Score: 1
Every time someone updates the graphics stack, I see little difference except an upheaval of software rewriting. I was there for X loadable modules, DRI, DRM, and now Wayland; it's a lot of talk for "we can already run OpenGL and have full graphics systems; we just don't have DirectX drivers, but fuck DirectX."
Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop
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KDE Turns 19
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· Score: 2
People keep misinterpreting the rapid increase in PC specs and the constant buying of a new $300 eMachine every 6 months as a healthy product market, and the more moderate pace of PC replacement as the death of the PC. They're also misinterpreting the boom of excessive numbers of mobile apps--mostly games--as the end of the PC industry.
People aren't throwing computers out the window. You don't see people living without a computer in their house, only a smart phone and a Galaxy Tab to do all their computer work. Some folks have just a Surface, but we had people with just a laptop or just a macbook back in 2000 during the "you need a laptop for college" fad; the Surface is a bona fide PC platform with touch screen and stylus capabilities.
PCs fell into the comfortable niche of common goods. They became like multiple pairs of shoes or wardrobes with several sets of clothes: even poor people have them. Remember when seeing a book probably meant you were never going to see that book again in your life, so you better memorize its contents? We order books from Amazon now.
Actually, he's pretty much right. Most people miss things by scale or by inappropriate extension of analogy.
To be on the Internet, you must connect to a service provider, or somehow jack into the thing. There are peering agreements and everything. This is like being a citizen of a nation, with free trade agreements with other nations.
Problem: you have literally billions of people emigrating every second, all carrying messages, many of them encoded, and only with the identity of where they officially disembarked from. If they disembarked from a friend's house or a hotel to travel to Turkistan, their identity is the friend's house or the hotel.
Anyone who can infiltrate any location or pretend to be from some other location is now impossible to identify. There may be better facilities at the destination, but hardly anyone uses a Photo ID (certificate authentication). On top of that, there's just so much traffic you have no way to analyze it all; much of it is encoded anyway, and secret organizations can use other people's locations as bases of operations to send coded messages around and through other intermediary clearing houses to hide their origins *and* their activities.
Oh, sure, if you can find them, you can revoke their access, prevent them from sending from that place anymore. Maybe you can physically arrest the individual. It happens to be very hard, though, because you're trying to control every interaction every individual has, without being able to positively identify any individual.
Old init ran init scripts. New init manages complex dependencies, makes sure the system state stays proper, journals failures, and generally does a lot of system component integration. People prefer cobbled together over complex architecture.
Still writing the paper, though I did the definitions section to try and outline the basic concepts. It's going to need a lot of explanation to make sense, but you can read it if you like, such as it is and what there is of it.
I need to organize things between theoretical basis, extensive concepts, observations, and conjectures about policy. Obviously, demonstrating how wealth grows, how productivity increases wealth, and how scarcity comes into existence shows some basic functions of economics; while showing how these allow various forms of welfare and taxation systems, or how income inequality affects an economy, is more observation and conjecture. I also need to just write, instead of spending all my time studying for the CAPM and playing video games; but who cares? Nobody cares. I freaking solved poverty and all I get is people quickly talking over me to cover up any concern for the poor so they can bitch about the rich having too much and talk about how we should tax them to death and take their stuff, because nobody honestly gives a shit about anyone with less--only about people they can blame and attack, which tends to be people with more.
Sort of. I've taken a more scientific approach to economics in my theories of wealth, which are on the whole inviolable; I handwave away market dynamics a lot, since market dynamics tend to converge on correctness in the same way pressure systems converge on correctness--raising the pressure or temperature in one area of a pressure system doesn't instantly make the whole container follow the ideal gas law and experience the same pressure, but rather causes a lot of shifting. The difference is markets are *always* shifting, never static (the same can be said of pressure vessels, though).
Most economists are shopkeepers. Land theory of value, labor theory of value, subjective theory of value, what is all that shit? It's a bunch of talk about "blah blah labor blah blah work done blah blah THUS THE PRICE TAG IS THIS MANY DOLLARS". That's all they want to talk about: how many dollars something sells for. It's idiotic.
I started writing an economics theory of wealth, talking about productivity, labor time investment, how all that changes, and what it does to a society. It's about as valid as evolutionary biology, as a theory; obviously, my theories will be superseded by other theories, which will themselves be superseded, and extended, and otherwise adjusted or built upon. Still, I work on bare truths only violated by human effort, in the same way you can violate survival of the fittest--that is, survival of the biological variations and mutations which out-breed the others--by intent and animal husbandry (which we routinely do, redefining "fitness" as "useful to human purposes, but not particularly likely to survive in the wild").
The most basic, fundamental concept is simple: labor costs drop. Everything--fuel production, transportation, material production, equipment operation, work done--is labor-driven. A 100% self-maintaining, self-fueling, self-operating system uses zero labor; we don't have any of those yet. Thus we find ways to produce fuel and materials cheaply, to use cheaper fuels and materials, or to use less fuel and materials; and we find ways to directly employ less labor.
Hunter-gatherers worked 15-20 hours per week to feed every 1 person. Modern agricultural workers spend something like 27 hours per year (actually less) to feed every 1 person. That's a lot of free labor time to build rockets and send Buzz Aldrin to the moon.
Hunter-gatherers could also produce enough food for 135 million humans, total, in theory. As food became scarce, they'd have had to spend more time foraging to scrounge up enough food: instead of 20 hours for 1 person, those last people now require 30 hours to find enough food, then 40, then 60. That's what scarcity is: to produce more units of output, you need more than a proportional increase in labor--10% more output requires more than 10% more labor. Sometimes the labor is impossible: we can fly to the stars, but do we have the labor-hours to produce the materials, fuel, and food to operate a space mining initiative?
I've explained why we have welfare, why welfare systems became possible, what wealth is, what determines buying power and inflation and so forth, and even produced the theory of supply-and-demand and the theory of scarcity as mere consequences and observations of the economic theories I've developed--the most fundamental economic ideals of merchant-economists, that they can sell you crap for more money if you want it badly enough, are mere consequences to my mind. I can even tell you why diamonds are expensive.
Merchant-economists should be mindful of real economics; the problem is nobody has written a real theory of economics by this point in history. Economists are all wandering around in loincloths wearing body paint.
In the US, the total individual income is something like 10.5 billion, while the total income is 12 billion. Corporations don't pay income tax on wages--they don't get $100 million, pay taxes on $100 million, then pay $90 million in salaries, and then you receive your paycheck and pay taxes on that. That $90 million is your income for working as part of the business.
Facebook paid 35 million pounds out as bonus wages, and paid very little in taxes. Surprise. Facebook is based in the US; how much are they getting as net revenue in the UK anyway?
but you do need to take him in his original context, and as an economics theorist rather then the carrier of the word of god.
I'm sure if I had the same information as Adam Smith I may have reached the same conclusions. My brain is habitually tuned to perform complex simulations by a representative process of progressive elaboration, so I can usually "figure things out" faster than other people and in more detail; this is simply something most people haven't taught themselves, and still doesn't produce good results (or produce results very quickly--sometimes I have to spend months generating new information) if the input is bad.
Still, the idea that work is decreased exclusively by division is ludicrous. Anyone familiar with discrete mathematics will immediately recognize the converse situation: can you find a way, without combining work, to make the same players do the same work less efficiently? Yes. Then there are obviously ways to simply streamline some subset of processes which exist, have existed, or will exist to produce the same output with less labor, and division of labor is only one way to do that.
Division of labor is a large source of efficiency improvement; it's not the only source, but it's a considerable one.
Also I don't like the theories of value. Macroeconomics has historically been about shopkeepers theorizing why goods have such a price tag. Land theory of value, labor theory of value, subjective theory of value... hasn't anyone thought to write a theory of wealth, identifying how large economies and large economic interactions change things like poverty, standard of living, income distribution, tax structures, the possibility of welfare, population growth, and so forth? Apparently not; they write about markets and call it macroeconomics.
Adam Smith was a bumbling fool; but even a fool who's using his brain gets a surprising amount right. Even the dumbass republicans and liberals and socialists have a huge swath of good ideas peppered with terrible conclusions. The effort of trying to be right about everything only gets you largely correct and on much better footing; someone will come by and fix the flaws in *my* economic theories one day, even, and the only reason there are any flaws there is because I'd naturally have written *more* *correct* theories if I was capable of recognizing those flaws with my current set of information. Once it's out there in such shape, people will recover the same information in much less time, and have more time to acquire further information to draw more precise conclusions.
Smith talked about the division of labor reducing the amount of waste labor. That's not the cause, but rather a mechanism: we can create new tools and rearrange assembly floors to reduce labor time spent on tasks; but we can also, as Smith observes, redistribute tasks and have new, specialized toolmakers create radically different and expanded sets of tools. For example: creating a power drill divides labor, as Smith suggests, by relying on miners, power plant engineers, infrastructure builders, motor manufacturers, and toolmakers to drive the drilling; but creating a better motor, a more efficient gearing set, and a better-designed drill uses all the same resources in more efficient ways *without* dividing labor.
The suggestion that everyone should learn to program goes against the division of labor principle. As I've demonstrated, this is not inherently wrong; however, it implies that the labor to train programmers is more efficient than the labor to produce specialized programs for the groups of otherwise-specialized laborers who use them. To put it simply: we're saying these particular engineers must also learn to be toolmakers, because hiring out toolmakers is less efficient than training engineers to produce their own tools. For that to be true, it must take the engineers sufficiently little time to make tools, and the tools must be of sufficiently high quality compared to those made by specialized toolmakers; if custom toolmakers can make better, more efficient tools in less time and with better quality to fit the needs of an engineer, then the engineers should spec and buy their tools from a competent toolmaker.
To my understanding, a little knowledge of computers is useful--particularly in data processing, meaning languages like AWK, sed, Perl, python, SQL, MongoDB's query structure, and other data-centric systems--but a full knowledge of large program structure is a waste of time to transfer and to put into use in unskilled hands. A dedicated programmer will accomplish the same output to higher quality in less time than a casual coder. I've made enormous use of sed and awk on the command line to rip through any arbitrary data I need to organize; some Excel knowledge would do me good as well in that use (I've got the basics, but nothing advanced); but everything beyond that is just general knowledge to me, useful and interesting, but not more useful than paying someone else to do it.
This will just devalue computer programmers, until they figure out "any random joe who knows C#" isn't a good computer programmer, anyway. Then they'll all be worth exactly what a college-degree-holding compsci student commands for salary.
It's all simple; people are just stupid. Look at the minimum wage answer to everything: they all imagine raising minimum wages will result in businesses paying it; yet raising minimum wages changes the ratio between labor cost of current methods and labor cost of alternatives. This encourages a transition to alternatives with lower labor time--which appears good for wealth growth, but isn't, because it starts to stall consumer market reflex and thus slows the creation of jobs to replace the displaced labor.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually advocate a Citizen's Dividend with a baseline of a 224sqft apartment, which includes a refrigerator and bathroom. The model of minimum wage and public aid is outdated and has reached the point of inflicting harm; Citizen's Dividend model is now cheaper, and avoids all the negative consequences of minimum wage and public aid while providing stronger benefits. Minimum wage and public aid was a good system for the 1900s, and impossible in the 1800s; it's not like we've never transitioned from something shitty like no welfare to something shitty like poor houses (jail for poor people, where we make you work but feed you), then to something less-shitty like unemployment insurance and old-age pensions. Time to move forward again.
By the by, as we increase our wealth, more of the total income goes to high-income earners--say you increase production by 10%, "the rich" get 6% of that and "the working class" get 4%, and everyone is better off, just some people more better-off than others. As this gap increases, the additional tax on higher income in a progressive income tax system offsets more of the working-class tax: without raising taxes on the rich, we can lower taxes on the working class. Reducing taxes on the working class is a good thing, because it lowers the cost of labor: without paying so much in taxes, you can maintain the same standard of living on a lower wage; with higher taxes, the standard of living you demand forces an increase in wages. We've developed enough wealth for the large split we see today, with more of the income going to high income earners; arresting the growth of our welfare system will ensure we can scale taxes down instead of scaling expenses up over time, and simultaneously provide an increase in basic standard of living over time forever.
I..know things.
When I left one job that I did a lot of work for, I gave them documentation on all the shit I did. We signed a contract in which they could commission me for up to 80 hours of consulting work over the next 6 months at $37.50/hr and I had to respond, in case they needed support.
Up-front pay is a lot of risk for the client: what if they never use you? They're doing this with 1,000 workers; if severance is 10% of their salary for 1 year, they're paying 100 workers full-time 1 year just in case they need to pull any of them back for any amount of time over the next 2 years. There will likely be a lot of IT workers winning big on this, pulling $10k out of their employer for nothing, and a few getting the shit end of the stick; the employer will likely pay for more work than it uses.
I have a lot of broad domain knowledge and do some of the same, but not with this kind of vigor. The dude's got a lot of *deep* domain knowledge in a lot of broad domains, so can pull more together. In either case, you face some of the same challenges.
The first problem you get is expert bias. Experts tend to filter things, because the brain processes information in such a way as to minimize effort. Using the prefrontal cortex is costly, so the brain uses every other facility to link together structured memories and behave habitually; even your beliefs and primary knowledge are an advanced form of programmed reflex. You can override your habitual behaviors by expending energy to make an analytical decision in the prerfontal cortex, and then apply immense mental effort via the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to direct your brain to do things differently--that's called "willpower", and your reserves of willpower are limited to the exhaustion of your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Ways around this include reprogramming (building new habits) and reframing (associating one behavior with another automatic behavior, so that the internal automatic behavior reduces the amount of willpower required to carry out the associated action).
I've developed a habit of working everything into my models of consistency. To a point, I research everything internally: when given a new fact, I build out from it by using my knowledge resources to explain it fully. I'll run into conflicts, and straighten out my own misconceptions; often, I find that the new fact gives me new information, but also has its own flaws that I must correct using my existing knowledge--this even happens with state-of-the-art knowledge which happens to be wrong, although you'll frequently find non-concrete situations where you need to import more data to decide which set of information is wrong. You become *quite* aware of where your understanding is limited and how to work around your limits doing this. The typical method is to compare the fact to internals, and reject it immediately if it doesn't fit in with your body of knowledge--using the new fact to explain your existing knowledge, rather than using your existing knowledge to explain the new fact.
The second problem you'll encounter is analogy fallacies. Analogies are the single most powerful tool you have. Many domains, ranging from biology to atomic physics to psychology to economics to computer programming, behave in roughly the same model, or roughly the same set of models. Most people miss the "roughly" part, the "set of models" part, or both: they assume any hint of X behaves like Y means X *is* Y and all things related to X have the same relationship and analogous behaviors to all things related to Y and to each other.
If a computer is like a human brain, with its processing facility (CPU), its working memory (RAM), and its long-term storage (secondary memory), then the computer must shuffle things between these like the brain does, and needs to compact and organize and associate its long-term storage while sleeping to operate efficiently, and every 1 and 0 is essentially a neuron, and those bits in RAM interact with each other in strange ways like in the brain... no, no, none of that is true. The computer needs to copy things out of long-term storage into RAM and then push that data through the CPU to perform computations, like a human brain; it doesn't operate in any other way like a human brain or a human body, and has a lot of functions which are quite different.
Get those things right and you can make yourself a quick-and-dirty genius. Not on that level, but impressive enough. The human mind can be trained in all sorts of ways to operate at an extremely high level of intelligence, and it's fairly trivial to turn schools into genius-mills. As I said in the beginning, though, the brain operates by internal reflex and habitual behaviors; you will need a lot of mental energy to rewire your brain into the kind of ridiculously powerful machine a guy like Wood carries around in his skull. Once you do it, it's done; but doing it is ... exhausting.
Yeah came here to say this. It's a contract for...? Legally, it's not even a valid contract if you're not exchanging anything; the contract is not valid until an exchange occurs.
If you contract to provide service, and then don't get paid, and so don't provide service, there's no contract. Mind you, if you contract to provide service, agree to back out by a certain date if you can't, then don't provide service, the first exchange is bidding: you provide service, and your client doesn't get anyone else to do it. If your client contracts a second guy as back-up without your informed consent, that's a firing offense, and you fire the client.
This is outgoing IP traffic from the mobile phone, not incoming from outside. Apple is claiming their mobile phone itself is incapable of sending a specific IP packet which another mobile phone can send just fine, unless the application has special permissions.
Apple has claimed it's not vulnerable to e.g. sending IP packets directly to IP addresses if those IP packets are SIP packets, with no substantiation. SIP applications can use TLS as well, making packet inspection difficult.
You assume that, given a land area the size of the earth and a large population, power will not concentrate with individuals, leading to social behaviors producing crime, political arguments, and international interactions which inevitably end in shows of force.
You may as well say you, as a human, have never *wanted* a think your neighbor has, or had sexual desired for another woman before you met or after you married your wife. You may moderate your responses, but they happen; others don't moderate their responses as much.
It is easiest to obtain power by uniting the goals and thinking of a people. It is easiest to increase and retain that power by directing their attention to an external threat and positioning yourself as the source of protection from that threat. Having done so, you can direct their actions to destroy that threat, thus war.
Amusingly enough, they make the fallacious argument that the human is always better in "emergency situations" than the car. That begs the question: why would a human be capable of recognizing and reacting to an emergency situation more quickly and correctly than a computer? If the human can recognize the situation so much better, won't the human avoid the situation entirely in the first place?
Most humans respond to emergency situations by panic braking and trying to steer out of the way, which usually spins the car. Without rigorous driver training in advanced city and highway driving classes provided by Summit Racing or Skip Barber's Racing School--training which ranges $1000-ish for 3 days of 8 hour training blocks--drivers in the US never receive any instruction on threshold braking, steering in emergency situations (with or without anti-lock brakes), skid recovery, suspension system limits (how well your car handles), and defensive driving techniques including active awareness and lane toss exercises (steering instead of panic braking when you can avoid an obstacle you can't brake fast enough to avoid hitting).
Most people just don't have these skills; and many crash into shit while putting on make-up or eating an egg mcmuffin in the car.
You came to rely on it so quickly because it requires less mental energy (finite in supply), so your brain rapidly developed new habits to avoid the expenditure. That allows you to accomplish more elsewhere without needing a recovery period. This system has its ups and downs; people are rabidly defensive of their misguided political positions because it takes a lot of mental energy to refactor them.
C is pretty rusty.
It starts, but it dies when it gets 70% through downloading my mailbox.
I worked at Best Buy around 2005-2006, when eMachines and Gateways were selling for $300-ish, and people were bringing in 6 month old computers and refusing to pay Geek Squad $500 for repairs, and just buying new $300 eMachines with better hard drives. That jump from 200MHz to 800Mhz to 1.5Ghz to 3GHz happened earlier, but the rest of the industry was still catching up for a decade after the gigahertz wars.
I don't use Firefox anymore. Thunderbird is shitty; I've tried switching to Evolution, but it chokes on gmail.
I've been enjoying Gnome 3 for years. Its local menu bars are a refreshing alternative to Ubuntu's stupid global desktop menu thing. I wrote a complete explanation of why top-of-screen menus are stupid--both from a spatial location sense (the menu's position relative to the working space changes when the working space moves on the desktop) and from a multi-window interface sense (you only need one click to activate a window and access its menu bar, versus two and a lot more mouse movement to activate a window and access the global menu bar). I do dislike its alt-tab behavior.
Even the KDE developers noticed my coverage of Michael Meeks's work in speeding up the loading of slow, bloated, clunky C++ applications. The C++ ABI is a horrible mess.
This was true back when Gnome 2 was using 400MB and KDE was using over a gigabyte, and when KDE applications required 10-15 seconds to start up while equivalent or more feature-complete GTK applications loaded in 2-3 seconds? I recall Galleon working much better with my 512MB RAM machine than Konqueror, thanks to not pushing me into swap hell with its ludicrous belief in a multi-hundred-megabyte RSS; to be fair, Opera would run a dozen tabs with a resident set size of 50MB, which I found astounding.
I'd always looked forward to the inevitable KDE migration to GTK+. It never happened. I tend to avoid Qt applications due to their slow loading and bloated memory use, as well as the poor UI standards your typical Qt UI designer uses.
Every time someone updates the graphics stack, I see little difference except an upheaval of software rewriting. I was there for X loadable modules, DRI, DRM, and now Wayland; it's a lot of talk for "we can already run OpenGL and have full graphics systems; we just don't have DirectX drivers, but fuck DirectX."
People keep misinterpreting the rapid increase in PC specs and the constant buying of a new $300 eMachine every 6 months as a healthy product market, and the more moderate pace of PC replacement as the death of the PC. They're also misinterpreting the boom of excessive numbers of mobile apps--mostly games--as the end of the PC industry.
People aren't throwing computers out the window. You don't see people living without a computer in their house, only a smart phone and a Galaxy Tab to do all their computer work. Some folks have just a Surface, but we had people with just a laptop or just a macbook back in 2000 during the "you need a laptop for college" fad; the Surface is a bona fide PC platform with touch screen and stylus capabilities.
PCs fell into the comfortable niche of common goods. They became like multiple pairs of shoes or wardrobes with several sets of clothes: even poor people have them. Remember when seeing a book probably meant you were never going to see that book again in your life, so you better memorize its contents? We order books from Amazon now.
Actually, he's pretty much right. Most people miss things by scale or by inappropriate extension of analogy.
To be on the Internet, you must connect to a service provider, or somehow jack into the thing. There are peering agreements and everything. This is like being a citizen of a nation, with free trade agreements with other nations.
Problem: you have literally billions of people emigrating every second, all carrying messages, many of them encoded, and only with the identity of where they officially disembarked from. If they disembarked from a friend's house or a hotel to travel to Turkistan, their identity is the friend's house or the hotel.
Anyone who can infiltrate any location or pretend to be from some other location is now impossible to identify. There may be better facilities at the destination, but hardly anyone uses a Photo ID (certificate authentication). On top of that, there's just so much traffic you have no way to analyze it all; much of it is encoded anyway, and secret organizations can use other people's locations as bases of operations to send coded messages around and through other intermediary clearing houses to hide their origins *and* their activities.
Oh, sure, if you can find them, you can revoke their access, prevent them from sending from that place anymore. Maybe you can physically arrest the individual. It happens to be very hard, though, because you're trying to control every interaction every individual has, without being able to positively identify any individual.
Old init ran init scripts. New init manages complex dependencies, makes sure the system state stays proper, journals failures, and generally does a lot of system component integration. People prefer cobbled together over complex architecture.
Still writing the paper, though I did the definitions section to try and outline the basic concepts. It's going to need a lot of explanation to make sense, but you can read it if you like, such as it is and what there is of it.
I need to organize things between theoretical basis, extensive concepts, observations, and conjectures about policy. Obviously, demonstrating how wealth grows, how productivity increases wealth, and how scarcity comes into existence shows some basic functions of economics; while showing how these allow various forms of welfare and taxation systems, or how income inequality affects an economy, is more observation and conjecture. I also need to just write, instead of spending all my time studying for the CAPM and playing video games; but who cares? Nobody cares. I freaking solved poverty and all I get is people quickly talking over me to cover up any concern for the poor so they can bitch about the rich having too much and talk about how we should tax them to death and take their stuff, because nobody honestly gives a shit about anyone with less--only about people they can blame and attack, which tends to be people with more.
Sort of. I've taken a more scientific approach to economics in my theories of wealth, which are on the whole inviolable; I handwave away market dynamics a lot, since market dynamics tend to converge on correctness in the same way pressure systems converge on correctness--raising the pressure or temperature in one area of a pressure system doesn't instantly make the whole container follow the ideal gas law and experience the same pressure, but rather causes a lot of shifting. The difference is markets are *always* shifting, never static (the same can be said of pressure vessels, though).
Most economists are shopkeepers. Land theory of value, labor theory of value, subjective theory of value, what is all that shit? It's a bunch of talk about "blah blah labor blah blah work done blah blah THUS THE PRICE TAG IS THIS MANY DOLLARS". That's all they want to talk about: how many dollars something sells for. It's idiotic.
I started writing an economics theory of wealth, talking about productivity, labor time investment, how all that changes, and what it does to a society. It's about as valid as evolutionary biology, as a theory; obviously, my theories will be superseded by other theories, which will themselves be superseded, and extended, and otherwise adjusted or built upon. Still, I work on bare truths only violated by human effort, in the same way you can violate survival of the fittest--that is, survival of the biological variations and mutations which out-breed the others--by intent and animal husbandry (which we routinely do, redefining "fitness" as "useful to human purposes, but not particularly likely to survive in the wild").
The most basic, fundamental concept is simple: labor costs drop. Everything--fuel production, transportation, material production, equipment operation, work done--is labor-driven. A 100% self-maintaining, self-fueling, self-operating system uses zero labor; we don't have any of those yet. Thus we find ways to produce fuel and materials cheaply, to use cheaper fuels and materials, or to use less fuel and materials; and we find ways to directly employ less labor.
Hunter-gatherers worked 15-20 hours per week to feed every 1 person. Modern agricultural workers spend something like 27 hours per year (actually less) to feed every 1 person. That's a lot of free labor time to build rockets and send Buzz Aldrin to the moon.
Hunter-gatherers could also produce enough food for 135 million humans, total, in theory. As food became scarce, they'd have had to spend more time foraging to scrounge up enough food: instead of 20 hours for 1 person, those last people now require 30 hours to find enough food, then 40, then 60. That's what scarcity is: to produce more units of output, you need more than a proportional increase in labor--10% more output requires more than 10% more labor. Sometimes the labor is impossible: we can fly to the stars, but do we have the labor-hours to produce the materials, fuel, and food to operate a space mining initiative?
I've explained why we have welfare, why welfare systems became possible, what wealth is, what determines buying power and inflation and so forth, and even produced the theory of supply-and-demand and the theory of scarcity as mere consequences and observations of the economic theories I've developed--the most fundamental economic ideals of merchant-economists, that they can sell you crap for more money if you want it badly enough, are mere consequences to my mind. I can even tell you why diamonds are expensive.
Merchant-economists should be mindful of real economics; the problem is nobody has written a real theory of economics by this point in history. Economists are all wandering around in loincloths wearing body paint.
In the US, the total individual income is something like 10.5 billion, while the total income is 12 billion. Corporations don't pay income tax on wages--they don't get $100 million, pay taxes on $100 million, then pay $90 million in salaries, and then you receive your paycheck and pay taxes on that. That $90 million is your income for working as part of the business.
Facebook paid 35 million pounds out as bonus wages, and paid very little in taxes. Surprise. Facebook is based in the US; how much are they getting as net revenue in the UK anyway?
but you do need to take him in his original context, and as an economics theorist rather then the carrier of the word of god.
I'm sure if I had the same information as Adam Smith I may have reached the same conclusions. My brain is habitually tuned to perform complex simulations by a representative process of progressive elaboration, so I can usually "figure things out" faster than other people and in more detail; this is simply something most people haven't taught themselves, and still doesn't produce good results (or produce results very quickly--sometimes I have to spend months generating new information) if the input is bad.
Still, the idea that work is decreased exclusively by division is ludicrous. Anyone familiar with discrete mathematics will immediately recognize the converse situation: can you find a way, without combining work, to make the same players do the same work less efficiently? Yes. Then there are obviously ways to simply streamline some subset of processes which exist, have existed, or will exist to produce the same output with less labor, and division of labor is only one way to do that.
Division of labor is a large source of efficiency improvement; it's not the only source, but it's a considerable one.
Also I don't like the theories of value. Macroeconomics has historically been about shopkeepers theorizing why goods have such a price tag. Land theory of value, labor theory of value, subjective theory of value... hasn't anyone thought to write a theory of wealth, identifying how large economies and large economic interactions change things like poverty, standard of living, income distribution, tax structures, the possibility of welfare, population growth, and so forth? Apparently not; they write about markets and call it macroeconomics.
It's more than that.
Adam Smith was a bumbling fool; but even a fool who's using his brain gets a surprising amount right. Even the dumbass republicans and liberals and socialists have a huge swath of good ideas peppered with terrible conclusions. The effort of trying to be right about everything only gets you largely correct and on much better footing; someone will come by and fix the flaws in *my* economic theories one day, even, and the only reason there are any flaws there is because I'd naturally have written *more* *correct* theories if I was capable of recognizing those flaws with my current set of information. Once it's out there in such shape, people will recover the same information in much less time, and have more time to acquire further information to draw more precise conclusions.
Smith talked about the division of labor reducing the amount of waste labor. That's not the cause, but rather a mechanism: we can create new tools and rearrange assembly floors to reduce labor time spent on tasks; but we can also, as Smith observes, redistribute tasks and have new, specialized toolmakers create radically different and expanded sets of tools. For example: creating a power drill divides labor, as Smith suggests, by relying on miners, power plant engineers, infrastructure builders, motor manufacturers, and toolmakers to drive the drilling; but creating a better motor, a more efficient gearing set, and a better-designed drill uses all the same resources in more efficient ways *without* dividing labor.
The suggestion that everyone should learn to program goes against the division of labor principle. As I've demonstrated, this is not inherently wrong; however, it implies that the labor to train programmers is more efficient than the labor to produce specialized programs for the groups of otherwise-specialized laborers who use them. To put it simply: we're saying these particular engineers must also learn to be toolmakers, because hiring out toolmakers is less efficient than training engineers to produce their own tools. For that to be true, it must take the engineers sufficiently little time to make tools, and the tools must be of sufficiently high quality compared to those made by specialized toolmakers; if custom toolmakers can make better, more efficient tools in less time and with better quality to fit the needs of an engineer, then the engineers should spec and buy their tools from a competent toolmaker.
To my understanding, a little knowledge of computers is useful--particularly in data processing, meaning languages like AWK, sed, Perl, python, SQL, MongoDB's query structure, and other data-centric systems--but a full knowledge of large program structure is a waste of time to transfer and to put into use in unskilled hands. A dedicated programmer will accomplish the same output to higher quality in less time than a casual coder. I've made enormous use of sed and awk on the command line to rip through any arbitrary data I need to organize; some Excel knowledge would do me good as well in that use (I've got the basics, but nothing advanced); but everything beyond that is just general knowledge to me, useful and interesting, but not more useful than paying someone else to do it.
This will just devalue computer programmers, until they figure out "any random joe who knows C#" isn't a good computer programmer, anyway. Then they'll all be worth exactly what a college-degree-holding compsci student commands for salary.
It's all simple; people are just stupid. Look at the minimum wage answer to everything: they all imagine raising minimum wages will result in businesses paying it; yet raising minimum wages changes the ratio between labor cost of current methods and labor cost of alternatives. This encourages a transition to alternatives with lower labor time--which appears good for wealth growth, but isn't, because it starts to stall consumer market reflex and thus slows the creation of jobs to replace the displaced labor.