Take a step back and ask if you believe that (a) Americans are genetically more likely to die young; (b) if America as a location is inherently more deadly from pesticides or something. Neither one flies for me.
You are left with only the two variables I can think of. Health care and lifestyle. Where "lifestyle" includes everything from "your personal diet and exercise" to "national norms in diet and exercise", to "crime" Japanese just eat less fatty foods; Europeans walk more. MOST nations have less bullet-related deaths.
A conservative of my acquaintance tried to pass it all of as the latter. I believe his harsh words were "subtract the crack babies and they're the same as Canada".
So I did some research which I alas can't cite, but it took me about 30 minutes with Google, so I'll leave it as an exercise. Limited to over-65 white males with kidney disease, Canada STILL had better survival rates. 65+ females with heart disease? Canada in the lead, by statistically significant amounts. I remember it running like that across a whole matrix of hospital-admissions reasons. Liver, digestive tract, neurological...pick your organ, it's better to get sick in Canada. The stats even apply (with much less force to be sure) for the American insured, probably because American "insurance" has a way of disappearing on you when most needed.
So, sorry conservatives, health care explains a lot. (Canada, sorry to admit, has ALL your obesity problems, and then some in a few provinces.)
Not to forget the early-deaths, but not all of those are bullet-related. A factoid from the current debate includes this one: children born into uninsured households have a 50% higher chance of dying before the age of 1. It doesn't take a lot of baby deaths to really haul down an average.
So, in summary: American lifestyles could improve. So could American health care. Blame both.
The Calgary Unix Users Group got a fine presentation over a decade ago on QNX, a real-time oriented OS that was waved about on a floppy at the meeting. According to Wikipedia, the "earlier" versions fit on a floppy, so perhaps no longer true...but the exact size is not that relevant with the floppy itself dead as a doornail.
Well, they have all those products as well. Trade disputes are generally about how much each protects their domestic industries with preferential subsidies, duties, taxes, etc. If the US takes a hard line on all negotiations about them, it ultimately hurts them by restricting trade, raising prices for all those things, and so on. And it hurts us - at least ten times as much, relatively.
If Wal-Mart is 80% of the "market" for some factory, and also gets that product from 10 other factories, then they can negotiate pretty hard on the product price. Canada-US trade is like that...for everything.
I did attempt to submit this as a story a year ago. Didn't make the cut:
rbrander writes "Canadian copyright watchdog Michael Geist has written the story of How the U.S. got its Canadian copyright bill". The arm-twisting was pretty up-front: "Canadian officials arrived ready to talk about a series of economic concerns but were quickly rebuffed by their U.S. counterparts, who indicated that progress on other issues would depend upon action on the copyright file."... "the USTR...made veiled threats about 'thickening the border' between Canada and the U.S. if Canada refused to put copyright reform on the legislative agenda."
So, bottom line: It isn't the industry telling a nation of 30M people what to do, it's an industry saying "We pull strings and US trade negotiators dance the mamba for us. Do as you're told or they'll dance that mamba all over your timber, cattle, grain, and steel sales to a trading partner 10X your size."
Not many people know that Canada is the US' largest trading partner: much larger than China, larger than China and Britain combined. But the converse is staggering: the US is 80% of our TOTAL world trade. When the US negotiators hit the table saying "No discussion of of all our trade issues about the big-ticket items until you cave on the little wee Intellectual Property issue", the Canadian government has very little choice but to comply. That goes across party lines.
...except change out "cloud-sourceing" for "Fourth-Generation Languages", and it could have been written in 1985.
Alas, "The Business End" resolutely REFUSES to let their IT be easy-to-make and easy-to-use; they always want "more power" even if it is illusory.
Look at the web: nothing could be simpler and hand more control over document production and dissemination than HTML assisted by a basic editor (the early ones were far simpler than word processors) and, say WinSCP to drag files up to a series of Unix directories on your Apache server. Problem solved, right? Word Processing could wither away.
But, no, no, they wanted control over the page appearance rather than the web concept of just defining the information and letting the web browser worry about presentation. They wanted every kind of embedded media - as proprietary as possible (just look at a common video format being evicted from HTML5) - and embedded programs in Java, JavaScript, Flash, PDF. And "The Business" eagerly grabbed each new development and ran with it, complicating the browser and server at every turn.
Now only expensive experts can possibly produce a web site that a large organization would allow under their URL.
Trust me on this: they'll find a way to make cloud-sourced solutions expensive and impenetrably complicated for all but those who spend 40 hours a week "keeping up" with the latest and learning the fine tweaks.
The Business' Reach Must Exceed Its Grasp, Else What is IT For?...sorry. To put it in Business terms: you can have the exact same cloud-sourced solution as everybody else for nearly free. Or you can gain competitive advantage on all the opponents who believe that by paying the usual 5-6% of corporate budget to an IT department to squeeze more functionality out of it. They will always do so, as surely as a Department of "Defence" will always seek to have bigger weapons that the other guys, regardless of the technological base that both opponents start from.
I don't think the article was really about carbon, it was about the raw expense. That was the topic I was on about, anyway. And for sheer operating cost, by time you've finished paying the pilots and mechanics and the airport fees, I think you're a ways in the hole.
Maybe I missed something surfing/. at 4, but everybody is arguing about the waste, the excess, the carbon, whatever - because its a CAR. There are thousands of private jets out there and few cost as *little* as $2.1M or use as little fuel.
Somebody buying one of these instead of a $5M on a new Gulfstream II they could also afford, is arguably being abstemious - and much more considerate of the environment.
And lets not get started on homes (on private islands or not); or even mention paying $37M for a painting.
Bottom line: it's not how excessive a purchase seems given what you are getting - it's just absolutely how much you are spending that makes it "consumption".
$2.1M would be very, very cheap for an M-1 tank - but getting an M-1 to pop down to the A&P in would still count as pretty conspicuous consumption.
This is great news for the/. crowd, most of whom have computers overpowered for their actual needs by a much, much larger margin than the 245 MPG Bugatti is overpowered for a trip to the A&P. Fortunately for them, their absolute expenditure was minor, so they aren't a bunch of contemptible jerks showing off and compensating for penis size.
Well, they might be, of course, but not for THAT reason.
Brevity (plus it was a side-topic) kept me from saying more than "much overrated", but I stand by the opinion. One reply talked about searching FOR books, which is different from searching IN books.
I was referring specifically to textbooks in the post, and not reference. You jump into a reference to answer one question, and get back to your essay or engineering problem. A textbook, you're supposed to cover - and if you aren't at least tempted to look at material in it that isn't in your course, you're missing much of what post-secondary is all about.
Yes, there's a "loss" of time spent leafing through a book to find something you want - i.e. checking each of six mentions of "Henry Kissinger" in a history book to find the Kissinger quote you wanted - but it's not a loss to your education.
I do worry a little that we are getting better and better at searching out specific facts, but worse and worse at just knowing a body of knowledge, where it is parallel-searchable in your brain, cross-referenced holographically with everything else you know. (The source of creativity and non-linear thinking, many think.) This question is being hotly debated in the Atlantic recently, with its duelling articles on "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" a while back vs. "Is Google Making Us Smarter?" this month.
Obviously, we need both - and I've no doubt whatsoever that today's students are getting very, very good at search; it's the "body of knowledge" part that I fear is in danger. I'm absolutely not some anti-Ebook luddite; I'm just not transported by them as some huge revolution.
To repeat: searchability is nice even in a textbook, but it may not be of enough added value to compensate for rentability or re-saleability.
Not to mention the now-ludicrous, unjustifiable prices textbooks now have to start with...
This is a business model that will be specifically forbidden with electronic books. And enforced by encryption or proprietary formats (which are, in a practical sense, the same thing), which in turn are protected by the DMCA.
To an economist, or public policy maker, that makes the new technology stand out like a sore thumb as not an improvement on the old.
This is an example that has been lost in other media as the new format offers many benefits over the old - the ability to have a movie at home at ALL, the ability to copy music easily and with no lost fidelity. But about all that electronic books give you over the old is a reduction in volume and weight (search capability, much overrated - books always had indexes and tables-of-contents, and besides, you're supposed to be learning the whole textbook).
The new media have only a few generations of history, most of it with shifting technologies - copying music at all was not possible for the general public until the cassette recorder in 1968.
But with electronic books, book rental couldn't exist, used book stores couldn't exist, and believe me, they'll be gunning for libraries themselves.
The dramatic contrast with centuries of tradition about how society does business with books might finally get it through politician's heads that enabling new, more restrictive copyrights is robbing the public.
You got the sixty million right, but are an order of magnitude out on the current population of cows. Here's my comment to Salon magazine 2 years ago on this subject: Here are my calculations, with references, courtesy of google and an hour of my time. Thanks also to the USDA and PBS. Size of national herd, all cows and calves: 106 million. http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/Catt/Catt-07-20-2007.txt Number on feed (multiplying their GHG impact): 11 million. (in short, they are only on feed near The End.) http://www.usda.gov/nass/PUBS/TODAYRPT/cofd0907.txt Number of bison they ecologically replaced, bison that ALSO produced GHGs: 60 million. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/frontierhouse/frontierlife/essay8.html OK, so because of the 11 million on feed, the 106 million cows have the GHG impact of a good 120 million grass-fed, so they have double the "natural" level produced by the bison? But wait! Or, rather, weight: Bull bison (37% of herd): 1800-2500 lb. Cow bison (45%): 900-1200 lb. Calves (18%):35 lb up to numbers above sources: Herd composition: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-541X(198907)53%3A3%3C593%3ACOBPEW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R Weight: http://www.gunpowderbison.com/Kids%20Corner So the TONNAGE of natural ruminants on the North American plains can be calculated from the above numbers (giving calves half the average of cow and bull) to be an "average bison" weight of 1559 lb. Times 60M, is 46.8 megatons. The US herd is lighter because it's mostly younger than a natural one; we slaughter cows at 2 years, bison live 20, so a higher proportion of the total is calves. My first reference also notes that just 33M of that national herd is over 500 lbs. Conservatively giving them all the full adult weight (from wikipedia, "cattle") halfway between 1300 and 1900 lb, and the average of the other 74M that are under 500lb, conservatively, at 400 lb...we get a total tonnage of beef at 41.2 megtons. Bottom line: there are fewer tons of beef now than there were of bison in the 19th century. Beef eater's disturbance of the natural methane balance is zero, indeed it may be NEGATIVE. Maybe not; 41.2MT is only 12% less than 46.8MT and my whole-hour of research may have missed a few things. Also, the amplification of GHG output by the 10% of the herd that's on feed is a factor. I'm willing to call it even, although my weight numbers were quite conservative. So, there's no GHG impact at ALL, compared to the original, natural state. At least not in North America -- but what was the former methane production everywhere that are now cattle ranches? Most ranching is done where there was an equivalent animal before. And even swamps and rainforests have quite a bit of decomposition that produces methane. Until you do that part of the calc - the previous GHG load from the former "natural" environment, you don't have a calculation, you have HALF a calculation.
Certainly. I'm only slightly harder to find on the Net than google. As a proud member of the Calgary Unix User's Group, who had the second internet connection in Calgary (we set up a 9600-baud modem to the University for 100 people to share in 1992), I've had the same home page address since 1993 - with my phone number on it.
And, like Jerry Pournelle, it's possible to find USENET posts from the early 90's that explain his advice, "Do not drink and post". Especially when your big secret username on every kind of Net forum is "rbrander".
I, however, have 20 years in at Water Resources, an established reputation as a shit-disturbing wiseacre nobody would promote to manager, but by the same token, little chance of losing the position I've got short of hate speech or outright malfeasance.
Somebody just starting their first job or second, on the other hand, wants as few liabilities as possible.
You can teach your kids to never express, at 14, an opinion that might be objectionable to somebody, somewhere - which goes against every rebellious impulse a teenager has - or you can teach them to be circumspect about their identity - which perfectly meshes with their love of intrigue and mystery.
Another reply indicated it goes against the grain to teach teenagers "subterfuge". It didn't for my parents, who impressed on me starting at age 6 that "there are things you don't discuss outside this house" - this included money matters and my parents' opinions of various neighbours and friends.
There's subterfuge *within* the family (bad) and subterfuge *outside* the family - totally necessary on the Net to avoid giving predators their real names and addresses. My advice is just an extension of that.
We all know to Net-proof kids right from single-digit ages not to provide identifying information to electronic correspondents that might be predators.
Now we're going to have to remember that "predators" needs to include "employers over a decade from now that may seize upon internet forum posts to take away your job or ruin your life".
So, kids: always set up accounts under a pseudonym. Use DIFFERENT pseudonyms. Strictly limit the friends that can connect your True Name (thx, Vernor Vinge) to your pseudonyms. And do not provide specific identifying information in any post. In forums that require True Names to work right (facebook), have Mom & Dad help you learn to consider words, and especially photos, carefully.
What they post at nine won't be held against them, but if you start developing their radar early, the appropriate attitudes of privacy and subterfuge will be reflexive by the late teens.
As for that first generation now looking for their first jobs with all kinds of youthful exuberance on the internet not staying on the internet - yikes, sorry, you're screwed. As the joke poster says, it may be your job to provide an example to others.
You got the government you deserve, just like your founders promised. The Executive won't stop this, you know that now - the most "transformational" figure you could have possibly elected got in, and he's down with all of the new executive powers. The Congress won't stop this, because you NEGLECTED TO FIRE MOST OF THEM for ignoring such things for years.
Start firing congressmen and senators in significant numbers, and things will change. Otherwise, quit the damn whining.
I'd have thought, with all the decades of observations, all the heavy-duty models we have of stellar evolution, that there would soon (or already) be figures for:
* The odds of this being a mild variability vs the odds on it being a stellar collapse as it switches fuels to one further up the periodic table;
* If it is undergoing a collapse, the odds on it being the "Last collapse" when it's already burned down to iron.
Cumulating in some distinguished-looking talking head saying "unfortunately, it's only 3% likely that we'll see it supernova in the next 50 years". Or whatever the number is.
I mean, the whole *galaxy* (~2x10^13 cu.ly) supposedly only gets one of these shows every century, and we're just inside a sphere of 10^7 cu.ly in volume around Betelgeuse, that's one two-millionth of the galaxy. The last Big One on record was the Crab Nebula (observed 1054 AD), ten times further away. We probably miss half of them that are on the other side of the galactic centre.
What I'm saying is, the odds against us getting this good a show are, well...I won't say the "A" word. So I don't want to get my hopes up.
Funny story, I read an article on supernovas once, which pointed out that if a star as close as mere dozens of ly were to blow, we'd all be fried. It actually ended with "The perfect candidate would be the red giant Betelgeuse, 600 ly away, far enough to be completely safe, while close enough to put on a mind-boggling show bright enough to read by."
Same here. One of the largest MULTICS installations in the world for many years was the University of Calgary that bought big into the idea. It was the technology that "should have been". The OS ran only one the one piece of hardware that we were ever aware of, the big Honeywell "DPS8" mainframe.
So all U of C students of the era (end-of-70's, most-of-80's) were taught PL/1 first and foremost; "C" was picked up on-the-fly by students working on Unix on our several VAX computers of the same era, rather than there being any actual C courses at the time. But PL/1 was considered the smart thing to learn if you wanted a commercial programming career, as it was surely the Coming Thing. I didn't learn C until my last year there (1984-85), for a computer graphics course on the VAX. (Yes, computer graphics on a 1 MIPS VAX, over a 9600-baud line to the graphics terminal. I still remember the scan lines coming in as you watched, building up a 512x512 image over the course of a minute. Then you would take a Polaroid photograph of the screen, there being only one laser printer in the University.)
The MULTICS OS, once you had the whole huge mainframe installation up and running, once you had the multiple experts keeping it so, was a flawed but basically great development environment. Everything but the kitchen sink, fine-grained security protocols out the yin/yang (it was designed for the military, mostly), vast virtual resources. And while PL/1 took a while to learn, it was also a "all but the kitchen sink" of languages. Don't tell me programmers don't want that, look at emacs. They want it, they just usually can't afford it.
Same with MULTICS; what UNIX brought to the table was that it was small enough and clean/understandable enough for scientists and engineers to run their own departmental minicomputer, and later their personal workstation. The industry went off in that direction rather than to ever-larger mainframes, as people making straight-line assumptions has imagined.
And it is STILL headed that way, with Unix running on netbooks, 30 years after that turning point. In the meantime, the rich, full, all-but-kitchen-sink environment of MULTICS would probably run on a $900 desktop nicely...which brings us to the other problem: totally proprietary and only maintainable if large companies were making tens of millions doing it.
But the quality of MULTICS was very high: secure, flexible, featureful, crashproof, 7x24.
But I also got this link, a discussion of statutory tax rates, vs effective tax rates (after all the deductions and other tax reliefs had been subtracted): http://seekingalpha.com/article/92485-statutory-vs-effective-tax-rates...which concludes that "the US is a corporate tax haven". That may be going a little overboard the other way, because what I found telling was this comparison of how much of the total tax income of various countries came from corporate tax (the rest from personal incomes taxes, basically):
By the way, terrific comedy about how if Microsoft won't move, somebody else will start up a company with maybe over 10 percent monetary advantage due to lower taxes elsewhere, and thereby out-compete MS from the market. "...you can't stop the free market". Dude, the entire anti-trust action was about how Microsoft is no longer subject to the free market. Hell, you can produce superior products and give them away for FREE and not out-compete Microsoft. So some little tax break isn't going to make a tiny bit of difference to their market share.
Microsoft probably wouldn't be where it is today if it had started in another country. They got access to a large, young, very educated workforce and were able to sell to the world's largest government and corporations as a local, patriotic choice. Try, just try, selling the US military in particular, any foreign-based product. Alas, it takes a lot of tax money to support that that large government, that huge, well-funded military, provide the schools and superhighways that train and transport that smart workforce. People who imagine taxes as a national drain rather than a national investment (generally by cherry-picking the least-defensible 1% of budget items as pork while ignoring the 99% that goes to very defensible schools, roads, etc) always imagine that the circumstances of their success are some kind of natural resource that was "just there". No, those circumstances were expensively built and expensively maintained, and recently, that's been done with borrowed money, and it's time to pay up.
People like Ballmer, of course, know all this. Ballmer is bluffing. Call him on it.
No, I can't recall any. FORTH is/was, however, the ROM-level pre-boot language you could set up a SUN workstation with.
Postscript is in fact just a variant of FORTH; or properly, it IS just FORTH with a bunch of specialized vocabulary added. (With FORTH, the operating system, the language, and your application all blur into each other. The language is just a list of FORTH "words" - each a program - that should be already written for you when you get it. Then you add more and more FORTH words to its vocabulary until the top-level ones provide your application. But there's no special distinction between the standard words and the ones you've added. )
A popular early-computer-graphics recursive program draws a tree, where each branch is another tree with (N-1) levels left. So a friend of mine wrote a Postscript/FORTH program about ten lines long. It takes about 1 second to "send to Print", then the poor Postscript interpreter in the laser has to chew on it for about an hour before this ten-levels-of-recursion tree comes out with about a million separate lines drawn.
FORTH was also the native language / OS of a very innovative, now-forgotten computer called the "Canon Cat" (when Canon imagined it might make a play in 8-bit computers, ca. 1980) designed by Jef Raskin, famed Mac innovator. Raskin, who wrote books on human (and humane!) interface design, liked FORTH for the ultrasmall footprint (everybody does), and because it had tools to address the floppy disk directly. (I said it was an operating system). Canon Cat floppies did not have to be formatted, the Cat just always stored documents as a multiple of the disk sectors. (This made sense with 160K disks; you would rarely have more than 1-2 documents per disk).
Much of the Cat's design was replicated as an add-on circuit card for the Apple II called the SwiftCard, if memory serves.
And, as mentioned, FORTH was found as a native language for a lot of programmable instrumentation. Where I ran across it in 1983 was for the "Golden River Retriever" traffic counting devices. They'd count cars going over an induction loop you buried in the road with a sawcut.
Come to think of it, it would be a surprise if HP did not use it in any of their many lines of lab instrumentation, especially back when the ability to fit a whole OS and language interpreter/compiler into about 16K was really handy.
"Exactly! Compared to 100 years ago, most people living in western nations are richer than their grand/parents. Standards of living have improved hugely. See issues like antibiotics, refridgeration, ubiquitous electricty, satellite television, long distance phone calls for pennies (or less), instant access to enourmous troves of information, lives that are decades longer, births that are far less fatal to mother and baby.."
All true in 1973, the year that economists generally peg as the point where the "middle class" stopped getting any richer and the share of the already-wealthy started to skyrocket. Basically, all the technological and productivity gains of the last 35 years have gone about 98% to making the top 10% or less richer and the lives of $29,000-a-year assembly-line workers have not changed significantly. They do have cell phones, I guess, and they can probably afford to go to Hawaii for both their honeymoon AND their 25th wedding anniversary, and they have 85 channels ("...and nothin' on").
I'm stretching the point - especially in electronics, and to some extent in medicine, it's been a terrific third-of-a-century. But the improvements to the bottom 80% of the population just don't TOUCH the effect that basic medicine, electricity, phones, radio, TV, semi-trailer cargo, (plus fridges) had on their basic standard of living in the first two-thirds of your last century. It was even more dramatic than the effect of trains, steamships, steam-powered factories and so forth had in the century before that. Partly, some suspect, because those 19th-century gains also went mostly to their rich class of the time. (The Luddites came about in part because life in the "dark satanic mills" was *worse* than the pre-industrial farms, so ill-treated were the workers.)
The original poster's point was that you need social change for the fruits of technological improvement to be broadly shared; otherwise, most people just get crumbs from the table, like the poor of undeveloped nations when vast sums are dropped on their leaders for "development". I sometimes wonder if 1973 was the start of another "19th century"-like period of industrial progress with social regression...which will surely lead at some point to another round of pent-up social changes, like the "trust-busting" laws and union movements of the early 20th.
I fell hard for FORTH in the mid-80's - it was the programming language of some instrumentation I had to work with. I never did program the instrumentation, but got all the books on the language and interpreters/compilers (the distinction blurs in FORTH...) for it for a number of computers. I did some useful utilities for the PC using "HS/FORTH". I benchmarked it against some other solutions for a course in comparitive computer languages about 1985, and for heavily stack-based (ie very recursive) programs, nothing could touch it. I'm talking QuickSort faster than C.
But I have to admit: though I busted butt, re-writing and re-re-writing programs to make them as clear and readable as possible, though I re-read the remarkable "Thinking FORTH" by Leo Brodie many times (and would recommend it to anybody who wants to understand the craft of programming, whether they want to learn FORTH or not)....despite it all, most of my FORTH programs were hard to read a few months later.
There were things it was really good at - that is, the programs WERE readable later, the problem and language were a match - and others where I could just not seem to decompose the problem into FORTH words that fitted well together without a lot of "glue" to manipulate the parameters on the stack.
That was the most frequent problem with my FORTH programming - one ends up trying to manage several parameters on the stack and doing a lot of stack "DUP SWAP ROTATE" - actions to line up the parameters to hand to the next word. I would re-compose the words and the parameters they wanted to clean up some code, and find I'd made some other code all hard to read.
FORTH was also profoundly command-line oriented, and when the word went all GUI-centric on me with no good "Visual FORTH" or "Tk/FORTH" on the horizon, I slipped from grace. I can't see getting back to it now, either; lets face it, a huge bonus for any programming language choice is its popularity, so that others will maintain your code, so that you can get help and code fragments with a quick google.
But I still think that FORTH should be a completely MANDATORY learning experience in all University and Tech CompSci degrees. You can jump from C to Perl to Python far more easily than to FORTH - it really comes at problems from another angle and working with it for years has been an enormous asset to my non-linear thinking when it comes to problem-solving.
And perhaps if more students learned it, FORTH would rise in popularity for some problems, out of its decades-long sinecure in embedded systems (it started off programming radio telescopes, and undoubtedly still does...) Since it is inherently object-oriented (yes, an assembler-sized OO language from the 1970's, you heard that correctly) it would be an excellent interpretive, experimentation-friendly scripting language for applications. I'm currently needing to do a lot of VBA in Excel at work, and I have a strong suspicion I'd be twice as productive in "FORTH for Applications". It's a tragedy Bill Gates fell for BASIC (of all languages) instead.
Argh. Those were actually the personal tax rates. Corporate info was in the next paragraph.
"In the Eisenhower era, corporations paid an average 25 percent of the federal tax bill; they paid only 10 percent in 2000 and 7 percent in 2001. The effective tax rate on corporate income amounted to 47 percent in 1960; it is only 35 percent today (before tax credits). Closing the most egregious shelters and returning to the 1960 tax rate could increase annual revenues by $110 billion. "
The whole notion that an increase in tax on corporations make the corporation unprofitable rests on the assumption that ONLY that one corporation sees its tax bill go up. If they ALL go up, then all that happens is that the tax is passed on in the form of higher prices for goods and services..except for corporations that have been making very high profits. They are taxed more, so the relative jump is higher and they may be forced to give up some of those high profits to stay competitive with corporations that have been scraping by on the usual 8%.
Hel-lo, Microsoft! You just got less competitive with RedHat and SuSE.
For all those predicting total economic disaster if corporate tax rates increase (and explaining that all these corporations must locate to the Caymans because the cost of compliance is just unendurable), note some stats from an article in The Nation from 2003:
"Currently, the top marginal tax rate is 38.6 percent, scheduled to drop to 35 percent by 2006.... The top marginal rate was: 91 percent to and through the Eisenhower years, indeed continuing up to 1964; 70 percent from 1965 to 1981; 50 percent from 1982 through 1986 (for the first Reagan Administration)."...neither historical period is noted for the flight of corporations from the US.
>>BSc in Physics. The job market doesn't seem to indicate any such need...at least not for anything below the Ph.D level
Funny, that's what I was told at the age of 17 by the head of the Physics department when my 98 in Physics made me figure I should take it in the University. (He did mention a BSc in physics might get you a job as a meteorologist...but this was 1975.)
I took engineering.
I'm afraid when I said "chemists, physicists, biologists" I was referring to PhDs the whole way. I think the original question in this item was about the guy's PhD specialty.
There was an article in Maclean's (our Newsweek) about a pure-science institute having trouble recruiting in the 90's and 00's because "an entire generation of physicists, chemists and biologists went into Finance instead".
The "quant" maths haven't been proven wrong, exactly; whether heavy mathematical analysis and modelling can make markets more efficient and lower-friction is a separate question from the morals of those managing them.
The trouble is, baroque complexity of financial instruments and transactions was the primary concealment tool that allowed all the lying in the first place - lying to other institutions, to regulators, and certainly to the public that handed over all their dough at low interest because the institutions were so guaranteed-safe; and I suspect, they managed to lie to themselves. Models - especially complex ones with many parameters - have a way of reflecting all the prejudices of (and pressures on) the developers. A big part of the scientific method is about systematically counteracting that. There is way less pressure to counteract if you are not working for open publication after a rigorous peer-review. If your models will be strictest trade secrets, however, your only reviewer is your boss - who may personally become hugely wealthy if the model says X, and not much, if it says Y. Science (as in, "the search for truth") suffers.
If nobody, for a generation or two, will trust an institution with opaquely complex business methods, the market for quants is going to stay "plummeted" for a long time. (It has already plummeted because of the contraction in the whole finance industry - I presume you are even asking about this career only because you think there will again be some job openings in 4 years when you complete a degree.)
I think even 4 years from now, there will still be surplus quants littering the weak market; resumes in the hundreds will flood in for openings.
So, stay away from THAT career, job-wise. There's a crying need for physicists, chemists, and biologists.
1) Government regulation (and enforcement) setting minimum working conditions.
2) Enthusiastic uptake of some kind of "no humans were exploited in the making of this product" sticker, in the free market.
I've found it heartwarming at work that the younger staff are all hugely in favour of "fair trade" products that purportedly don't exploit poor farmers and farm labourers, mostly as applied to coffee and sugar products. The aggressively seek them out and we have people coming from floors around to our "fair trade only" coffee station. We older folks are "for" this stuff as long as you stick it under our noses, shame us a bit, and it doesn't cost *much* more.
Which it doesn't, of course - that's the pathetic thing about these stories - the conditions in that factory, as opposed to conditions that might not pass muster here but at least wouldn't *disgust* you, are probably scraping $2 off the cost of the $60 "MS Egronomic 4000" keyboard that you could only pry from my cold, dead (non-RSI'd) fingers. I'd be happy to pay $65 if it came with such a sticker...the other $3 paying for the checking and enforcement of the rules from the sticker-issuing NGO.
Yes, I too can choose from cable, multiple DSL offerings from different companies, and 3G services. Canada has all of that, perhaps you have us confused with North Korea. I'm not talking about that.
Look it up. The term "natural monopolies" means "natural", not "government created". It refers to things like road networks where putting in two of them would be prohibitively expensive; the infrastructure is only affordable AT ALL because it serves everybody. (Also, with roads, exactly where would you put the second competitive network so it didn't intersect with the first? All Underground?)
I work for a water/sewer utility; you can argue about privatizing us, but you can't argue that it would ever pay anybody to put in a second set of water & sewer pipes in order to compete with us. (total length of water, sewer & storm systems: 8400 miles; installation cost: $9 billion; number of people to spread this out over: 1M; cost per 2.5 person household: $23,000, or 19 years of its water/sewer bills. Then try paying for the plants. And our operations costs.)
I think you'll find that your 5 (or 55) DSL suppliers all use the same set of wires; I don't know of a city with two sets of phone wires all the way to the house. Your "competitive" companies can only be competitive within a narrow range of add-on services over and above what they all must pay to the telco that owns those wires.
The discovery that both the 1930's phone wires and the 1970's television cable wires could both carry internet did create a first: two networks to each house that can provide the same service. But, alas, despite the fact that these are quite different technologies and network problems and infrastructure ages, and SHOULD have had different prices, the price for Internet in most places with both DSL and cable is quite similar between the two. Both are, of course, charging all the traffic will bear, because only two competitors isn't very competitive. I believe economists are very skeptical of competive environments with fewer than six vendors.
Even if projects to put in wireless competition and a whole third network of fiber, were not routinely shut down by (privately-owned) monopolies (I don't recall any government-owned telcos doing so), they wouldn't be "enough" comptition to really establish a free market. (Yes...fiber is coming: but from your phone company to replace its copper. Still a monopoly.)
So...we're stuck with monopolies. They can be public, partially so, or wholly private; and they can be tightly regulated, even subsidized, or not very regulated. Different countries are trying different strategies.
And the US strategy is clearly falling behind those of many other countries. Even, yes, Canada.
I'm sorry, I don't want to insult your religion; I'm just stating economic and technical facts.
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Take a step back and ask if you believe that (a) Americans are genetically more likely to die young; (b) if America as a location is inherently more deadly from pesticides or something. Neither one flies for me.
You are left with only the two variables I can think of. Health care and lifestyle. Where "lifestyle" includes everything from "your personal diet and exercise" to "national norms in diet and exercise", to "crime" Japanese just eat less fatty foods; Europeans walk more. MOST nations have less bullet-related deaths.
A conservative of my acquaintance tried to pass it all of as the latter. I believe his harsh words were "subtract the crack babies and they're the same as Canada".
So I did some research which I alas can't cite, but it took me about 30 minutes with Google, so I'll leave it as an exercise. Limited to over-65 white males with kidney disease, Canada STILL had better survival rates. 65+ females with heart disease? Canada in the lead, by statistically significant amounts. I remember it running like that across a whole matrix of hospital-admissions reasons. Liver, digestive tract, neurological...pick your organ, it's better to get sick in Canada. The stats even apply (with much less force to be sure) for the American insured, probably because American "insurance" has a way of disappearing on you when most needed.
So, sorry conservatives, health care explains a lot. (Canada, sorry to admit, has ALL your obesity problems, and then some in a few provinces.)
Not to forget the early-deaths, but not all of those are bullet-related. A factoid from the current debate includes this one: children born into uninsured households have a 50% higher chance of dying before the age of 1. It doesn't take a lot of baby deaths to really haul down an average.
So, in summary: American lifestyles could improve. So could American health care. Blame both.
The Calgary Unix Users Group got a fine presentation over a decade ago on QNX, a real-time oriented OS that was waved about on a floppy at the meeting. According to Wikipedia, the "earlier" versions fit on a floppy, so perhaps no longer true...but the exact size is not that relevant with the floppy itself dead as a doornail.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX
The thing about QNX is that it is a Unix, POSIX-compliant, no less; and in contrast to Menuet being closed, QNX was recently freed up.
Kudos on the assembler work, though... the great Steve Gibson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Gibson_(computer_programmer) )
would be pleased
Well, they have all those products as well. Trade disputes are generally about how much each protects their domestic industries with preferential subsidies, duties, taxes, etc. If the US takes a hard line on all negotiations about them, it ultimately hurts them by restricting trade, raising prices for all those things, and so on. And it hurts us - at least ten times as much, relatively.
If Wal-Mart is 80% of the "market" for some factory, and also gets that product from 10 other factories, then they can negotiate pretty hard on the product price. Canada-US trade is like that...for everything.
I did attempt to submit this as a story a year ago. Didn't make the cut:
rbrander writes "Canadian copyright watchdog Michael Geist has written the story of How the U.S. got its Canadian copyright bill". The arm-twisting was pretty up-front: "Canadian officials arrived ready to talk about a series of economic concerns but were quickly rebuffed by their U.S. counterparts, who indicated that progress on other issues would depend upon action on the copyright file." ... "the USTR...made veiled threats about 'thickening the border' between Canada and the U.S. if Canada refused to put copyright reform on the legislative agenda."
The link for that submission was: http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/443867
So, bottom line: It isn't the industry telling a nation of 30M people what to do, it's an industry saying "We pull strings and US trade negotiators dance the mamba for us. Do as you're told or they'll dance that mamba all over your timber, cattle, grain, and steel sales to a trading partner 10X your size."
Not many people know that Canada is the US' largest trading partner: much larger than China, larger than China and Britain combined. But the converse is staggering: the US is 80% of our TOTAL world trade. When the US negotiators hit the table saying "No discussion of of all our trade issues about the big-ticket items until you cave on the little wee Intellectual Property issue", the Canadian government has very little choice but to comply. That goes across party lines.
...except change out "cloud-sourceing" for "Fourth-Generation Languages", and it could have been written in 1985.
Alas, "The Business End" resolutely REFUSES to let their IT be easy-to-make and easy-to-use; they always want "more power" even if it is illusory.
Look at the web: nothing could be simpler and hand more control over document production and dissemination than HTML assisted by a basic editor (the early ones were far simpler than word processors) and, say WinSCP to drag files up to a series of Unix directories on your Apache server. Problem solved, right? Word Processing could wither away.
But, no, no, they wanted control over the page appearance rather than the web concept of just defining the information and letting the web browser worry about presentation. They wanted every kind of embedded media - as proprietary as possible (just look at a common video format being evicted from HTML5) - and embedded programs in Java, JavaScript, Flash, PDF. And "The Business" eagerly grabbed each new development and ran with it, complicating the browser and server at every turn.
Now only expensive experts can possibly produce a web site that a large organization would allow under their URL.
Trust me on this: they'll find a way to make cloud-sourced solutions expensive and impenetrably complicated for all but those who spend 40 hours a week "keeping up" with the latest and learning the fine tweaks.
The Business' Reach Must Exceed Its Grasp, Else What is IT For? ...sorry. To put it in Business terms: you can have the exact same cloud-sourced solution as everybody else for nearly free. Or you can gain competitive advantage on all the opponents who believe that by paying the usual 5-6% of corporate budget to an IT department to squeeze more functionality out of it. They will always do so, as surely as a Department of "Defence" will always seek to have bigger weapons that the other guys, regardless of the technological base that both opponents start from.
I don't think the article was really about carbon, it was about the raw expense. That was the topic I was on about, anyway. And for sheer operating cost, by time you've finished paying the pilots and mechanics and the airport fees, I think you're a ways in the hole.
Maybe I missed something surfing /. at 4, but everybody is arguing about the waste, the excess, the carbon, whatever - because its a CAR. There are thousands of private jets out there and few cost as *little* as $2.1M or use as little fuel.
Somebody buying one of these instead of a $5M on a new Gulfstream II they could also afford, is arguably being abstemious - and much more considerate of the environment.
And lets not get started on homes (on private islands or not); or even mention paying $37M for a painting.
Bottom line: it's not how excessive a purchase seems given what you are getting - it's just absolutely how much you are spending that makes it "consumption".
$2.1M would be very, very cheap for an M-1 tank - but getting an M-1 to pop down to the A&P in would still count as pretty conspicuous consumption.
This is great news for the /. crowd, most of whom have computers overpowered for their actual needs by a much, much larger margin than the 245 MPG Bugatti is overpowered for a trip to the A&P. Fortunately for them, their absolute expenditure was minor, so they aren't a bunch of contemptible jerks showing off and compensating for penis size.
Well, they might be, of course, but not for THAT reason.
Brevity (plus it was a side-topic) kept me from saying more than "much overrated", but I stand by the opinion. One reply talked about searching FOR books, which is different from searching IN books.
I was referring specifically to textbooks in the post, and not reference. You jump into a reference to answer one question, and get back to your essay or engineering problem. A textbook, you're supposed to cover - and if you aren't at least tempted to look at material in it that isn't in your course, you're missing much of what post-secondary is all about.
Yes, there's a "loss" of time spent leafing through a book to find something you want - i.e. checking each of six mentions of "Henry Kissinger" in a history book to find the Kissinger quote you wanted - but it's not a loss to your education.
I do worry a little that we are getting better and better at searching out specific facts, but worse and worse at just knowing a body of knowledge, where it is parallel-searchable in your brain, cross-referenced holographically with everything else you know. (The source of creativity and non-linear thinking, many think.) This question is being hotly debated in the Atlantic recently, with its duelling articles on "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" a while back vs. "Is Google Making Us Smarter?" this month.
Obviously, we need both - and I've no doubt whatsoever that today's students are getting very, very good at search; it's the "body of knowledge" part that I fear is in danger. I'm absolutely not some anti-Ebook luddite; I'm just not transported by them as some huge revolution.
To repeat: searchability is nice even in a textbook, but it may not be of enough added value to compensate for rentability or re-saleability.
Not to mention the now-ludicrous, unjustifiable prices textbooks now have to start with...
This is a business model that will be specifically forbidden with electronic books. And enforced by encryption or proprietary formats (which are, in a practical sense, the same thing), which in turn are protected by the DMCA.
To an economist, or public policy maker, that makes the new technology stand out like a sore thumb as not an improvement on the old.
This is an example that has been lost in other media as the new format offers many benefits over the old - the ability to have a movie at home at ALL, the ability to copy music easily and with no lost fidelity. But about all that electronic books give you over the old is a reduction in volume and weight (search capability, much overrated - books always had indexes and tables-of-contents, and besides, you're supposed to be learning the whole textbook).
The new media have only a few generations of history, most of it with shifting technologies - copying music at all was not possible for the general public until the cassette recorder in 1968.
But with electronic books, book rental couldn't exist, used book stores couldn't exist, and believe me, they'll be gunning for libraries themselves.
The dramatic contrast with centuries of tradition about how society does business with books might finally get it through politician's heads that enabling new, more restrictive copyrights is robbing the public.
You got the sixty million right, but are an order of magnitude out on the current population of cows. Here's my comment to Salon magazine 2 years ago on this subject: :35 lb up to numbers above
Here are my calculations, with references, courtesy of google and an hour of my time. Thanks also to the USDA and PBS.
Size of national herd, all cows and calves: 106 million.
http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/Catt/Catt-07-20-2007.txt
Number on feed (multiplying their GHG impact): 11 million.
(in short, they are only on feed near The End.)
http://www.usda.gov/nass/PUBS/TODAYRPT/cofd0907.txt
Number of bison they ecologically replaced, bison that ALSO produced GHGs:
60 million.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/frontierhouse/frontierlife/essay8.html
OK, so because of the 11 million on feed, the 106 million cows have the GHG impact of a good 120 million grass-fed, so they have double the "natural" level produced by the bison?
But wait! Or, rather, weight:
Bull bison (37% of herd): 1800-2500 lb.
Cow bison (45%): 900-1200 lb.
Calves (18%)
sources:
Herd composition:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-541X(198907)53%3A3%3C593%3ACOBPEW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R
Weight:
http://www.gunpowderbison.com/Kids%20Corner
So the TONNAGE of natural ruminants on the North American plains can be calculated from the above numbers (giving calves half the average of cow and bull) to be an "average bison" weight of 1559 lb. Times 60M, is 46.8 megatons.
The US herd is lighter because it's mostly younger than a natural one; we slaughter cows at 2 years, bison live 20, so a higher proportion of the total is calves.
My first reference also notes that just 33M of that national herd is over 500 lbs. Conservatively giving them all the full adult weight (from wikipedia, "cattle") halfway between 1300 and 1900 lb, and the average of the other 74M that are under 500lb, conservatively, at 400 lb...we get a total tonnage of beef at 41.2 megtons.
Bottom line: there are fewer tons of beef now than there were of bison in the 19th century. Beef eater's disturbance of the natural methane balance is zero, indeed it may be NEGATIVE.
Maybe not; 41.2MT is only 12% less than 46.8MT and my whole-hour of research may have missed a few things. Also, the amplification of GHG output by the 10% of the herd that's on feed is a factor. I'm willing to call it even, although my weight numbers were quite conservative.
So, there's no GHG impact at ALL, compared to the original, natural state. At least not in North America -- but what was the former methane production everywhere that are now cattle ranches? Most ranching is done where there was an equivalent animal before. And even swamps and rainforests have quite a bit of decomposition that produces methane.
Until you do that part of the calc - the previous GHG load from the former "natural" environment, you don't have a calculation, you have HALF a calculation.
Certainly. I'm only slightly harder to find on the Net than google. As a proud member of the Calgary Unix User's Group, who had the second internet connection in Calgary (we set up a 9600-baud modem to the University for 100 people to share in 1992), I've had the same home page address since 1993 - with my phone number on it.
And, like Jerry Pournelle, it's possible to find USENET posts from the early 90's that explain his advice, "Do not drink and post". Especially when your big secret username on every kind of Net forum is "rbrander".
I, however, have 20 years in at Water Resources, an established reputation as a shit-disturbing wiseacre nobody would promote to manager, but by the same token, little chance of losing the position I've got short of hate speech or outright malfeasance.
Somebody just starting their first job or second, on the other hand, wants as few liabilities as possible.
You can teach your kids to never express, at 14, an opinion that might be objectionable to somebody, somewhere - which goes against every rebellious impulse a teenager has - or you can teach them to be circumspect about their identity - which perfectly meshes with their love of intrigue and mystery.
Another reply indicated it goes against the grain to teach teenagers "subterfuge". It didn't for my parents, who impressed on me starting at age 6 that "there are things you don't discuss outside this house" - this included money matters and my parents' opinions of various neighbours and friends.
There's subterfuge *within* the family (bad) and subterfuge *outside* the family - totally necessary on the Net to avoid giving predators their real names and addresses. My advice is just an extension of that.
We all know to Net-proof kids right from single-digit ages not to provide identifying information to electronic correspondents that might be predators.
Now we're going to have to remember that "predators" needs to include "employers over a decade from now that may seize upon internet forum posts to take away your job or ruin your life".
So, kids: always set up accounts under a pseudonym. Use DIFFERENT pseudonyms. Strictly limit the friends that can connect your True Name (thx, Vernor Vinge) to your pseudonyms. And do not provide specific identifying information in any post. In forums that require True Names to work right (facebook), have Mom & Dad help you learn to consider words, and especially photos, carefully.
What they post at nine won't be held against them, but if you start developing their radar early, the appropriate attitudes of privacy and subterfuge will be reflexive by the late teens.
As for that first generation now looking for their first jobs with all kinds of youthful exuberance on the internet not staying on the internet - yikes, sorry, you're screwed. As the joke poster says, it may be your job to provide an example to others.
You got the government you deserve, just like your founders promised. The Executive won't stop this, you know that now - the most "transformational" figure you could have possibly elected got in, and he's down with all of the new executive powers. The Congress won't stop this, because you NEGLECTED TO FIRE MOST OF THEM for ignoring such things for years.
Start firing congressmen and senators in significant numbers, and things will change. Otherwise, quit the damn whining.
I'd have thought, with all the decades of observations, all the heavy-duty models we have of stellar evolution, that there would soon (or already) be figures for:
* The odds of this being a mild variability vs the odds on it being a stellar collapse as it switches fuels to one further up the periodic table;
* If it is undergoing a collapse, the odds on it being the "Last collapse" when it's already burned down to iron.
Cumulating in some distinguished-looking talking head saying "unfortunately, it's only 3% likely that we'll see it supernova in the next 50 years". Or whatever the number is.
I mean, the whole *galaxy* (~2x10^13 cu.ly) supposedly only gets one of these shows every century, and we're just inside a sphere of 10^7 cu.ly in volume around Betelgeuse, that's one two-millionth of the galaxy. The last Big One on record was the Crab Nebula (observed 1054 AD), ten times further away. We probably miss half of them that are on the other side of the galactic centre.
What I'm saying is, the odds against us getting this good a show are, well...I won't say the "A" word. So I don't want to get my hopes up.
Funny story, I read an article on supernovas once, which pointed out that if a star as close as mere dozens of ly were to blow, we'd all be fried. It actually ended with "The perfect candidate would be the red giant Betelgeuse, 600 ly away, far enough to be completely safe, while close enough to put on a mind-boggling show bright enough to read by."
Same here. One of the largest MULTICS installations in the world for many years was the University of Calgary that bought big into the idea. It was the technology that "should have been". The OS ran only one the one piece of hardware that we were ever aware of, the big Honeywell "DPS8" mainframe.
So all U of C students of the era (end-of-70's, most-of-80's) were taught PL/1 first and foremost; "C" was picked up on-the-fly by students working on Unix on our several VAX computers of the same era, rather than there being any actual C courses at the time. But PL/1 was considered the smart thing to learn if you wanted a commercial programming career, as it was surely the Coming Thing. I didn't learn C until my last year there (1984-85), for a computer graphics course on the VAX. (Yes, computer graphics on a 1 MIPS VAX, over a 9600-baud line to the graphics terminal. I still remember the scan lines coming in as you watched, building up a 512x512 image over the course of a minute. Then you would take a Polaroid photograph of the screen, there being only one laser printer in the University.)
The MULTICS OS, once you had the whole huge mainframe installation up and running, once you had the multiple experts keeping it so, was a flawed but basically great development environment. Everything but the kitchen sink, fine-grained security protocols out the yin/yang (it was designed for the military, mostly), vast virtual resources. And while PL/1 took a while to learn, it was also a "all but the kitchen sink" of languages. Don't tell me programmers don't want that, look at emacs. They want it, they just usually can't afford it.
Same with MULTICS; what UNIX brought to the table was that it was small enough and clean/understandable enough for scientists and engineers to run their own departmental minicomputer, and later their personal workstation. The industry went off in that direction rather than to ever-larger mainframes, as people making straight-line assumptions has imagined.
And it is STILL headed that way, with Unix running on netbooks, 30 years after that turning point. In the meantime, the rich, full, all-but-kitchen-sink environment of MULTICS would probably run on a $900 desktop nicely...which brings us to the other problem: totally proprietary and only maintainable if large companies were making tens of millions doing it.
But the quality of MULTICS was very high: secure, flexible, featureful, crashproof, 7x24.
When I googled ' "corporate tax rates", usa, graph ' I, too, got the Wikipedia that makes it look like the USA has very high corporate tax rates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_around_the_world
But I also got this link, a discussion of statutory tax rates, vs effective tax rates (after all the deductions and other tax reliefs had been subtracted): http://seekingalpha.com/article/92485-statutory-vs-effective-tax-rates ...which concludes that "the US is a corporate tax haven". That may be going a little overboard the other way, because what I found telling was this comparison of how much of the total tax income of various countries came from corporate tax (the rest from personal incomes taxes, basically):
http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/2229/Corporate_tax_warning.html ...which shows the US to be about median for developed countries. (Looks like Germany is the real tax haven.)
By the way, terrific comedy about how if Microsoft won't move, somebody else will start up a company with maybe over 10 percent monetary advantage due to lower taxes elsewhere, and thereby out-compete MS from the market. "...you can't stop the free market". Dude, the entire anti-trust action was about how Microsoft is no longer subject to the free market. Hell, you can produce superior products and give them away for FREE and not out-compete Microsoft. So some little tax break isn't going to make a tiny bit of difference to their market share.
Microsoft probably wouldn't be where it is today if it had started in another country. They got access to a large, young, very educated workforce and were able to sell to the world's largest government and corporations as a local, patriotic choice. Try, just try, selling the US military in particular, any foreign-based product. Alas, it takes a lot of tax money to support that that large government, that huge, well-funded military, provide the schools and superhighways that train and transport that smart workforce. People who imagine taxes as a national drain rather than a national investment (generally by cherry-picking the least-defensible 1% of budget items as pork while ignoring the 99% that goes to very defensible schools, roads, etc) always imagine that the circumstances of their success are some kind of natural resource that was "just there". No, those circumstances were expensively built and expensively maintained, and recently, that's been done with borrowed money, and it's time to pay up.
People like Ballmer, of course, know all this. Ballmer is bluffing. Call him on it.
No, I can't recall any. FORTH is/was, however, the ROM-level pre-boot language you could set up a SUN workstation with.
Postscript is in fact just a variant of FORTH; or properly, it IS just FORTH with a bunch of specialized vocabulary added. (With FORTH, the operating system, the language, and your application all blur into each other. The language is just a list of FORTH "words" - each a program - that should be already written for you when you get it. Then you add more and more FORTH words to its vocabulary until the top-level ones provide your application. But there's no special distinction between the standard words and the ones you've added. )
A popular early-computer-graphics recursive program draws a tree, where each branch is another tree with (N-1) levels left. So a friend of mine wrote a Postscript/FORTH program about ten lines long. It takes about 1 second to "send to Print", then the poor Postscript interpreter in the laser has to chew on it for about an hour before this ten-levels-of-recursion tree comes out with about a million separate lines drawn.
FORTH was also the native language / OS of a very innovative, now-forgotten computer called the "Canon Cat" (when Canon imagined it might make a play in 8-bit computers, ca. 1980) designed by Jef Raskin, famed Mac innovator. Raskin, who wrote books on human (and humane!) interface design, liked FORTH for the ultrasmall footprint (everybody does), and because it had tools to address the floppy disk directly. (I said it was an operating system). Canon Cat floppies did not have to be formatted, the Cat just always stored documents as a multiple of the disk sectors. (This made sense with 160K disks; you would rarely have more than 1-2 documents per disk).
Much of the Cat's design was replicated as an add-on circuit card for the Apple II called the SwiftCard, if memory serves.
And, as mentioned, FORTH was found as a native language for a lot of programmable instrumentation. Where I ran across it in 1983 was for the "Golden River Retriever" traffic counting devices. They'd count cars going over an induction loop you buried in the road with a sawcut.
Come to think of it, it would be a surprise if HP did not use it in any of their many lines of lab instrumentation, especially back when the ability to fit a whole OS and language interpreter/compiler into about 16K was really handy.
"Exactly! Compared to 100 years ago, most people living in western nations are richer than their grand/parents. Standards of living have improved hugely. See issues like antibiotics, refridgeration, ubiquitous electricty, satellite television, long distance phone calls for pennies (or less), instant access to enourmous troves of information, lives that are decades longer, births that are far less fatal to mother and baby.."
All true in 1973, the year that economists generally peg as the point where the "middle class" stopped getting any richer and the share of the already-wealthy started to skyrocket. Basically, all the technological and productivity gains of the last 35 years have gone about 98% to making the top 10% or less richer and the lives of $29,000-a-year assembly-line workers have not changed significantly. They do have cell phones, I guess, and they can probably afford to go to Hawaii for both their honeymoon AND their 25th wedding anniversary, and they have 85 channels ("...and nothin' on").
I'm stretching the point - especially in electronics, and to some extent in medicine, it's been a terrific third-of-a-century. But the improvements to the bottom 80% of the population just don't TOUCH the effect that basic medicine, electricity, phones, radio, TV, semi-trailer cargo, (plus fridges) had on their basic standard of living in the first two-thirds of your last century. It was even more dramatic than the effect of trains, steamships, steam-powered factories and so forth had in the century before that. Partly, some suspect, because those 19th-century gains also went mostly to their rich class of the time. (The Luddites came about in part because life in the "dark satanic mills" was *worse* than the pre-industrial farms, so ill-treated were the workers.)
The original poster's point was that you need social change for the fruits of technological improvement to be broadly shared; otherwise, most people just get crumbs from the table, like the poor of undeveloped nations when vast sums are dropped on their leaders for "development". I sometimes wonder if 1973 was the start of another "19th century"-like period of industrial progress with social regression...which will surely lead at some point to another round of pent-up social changes, like the "trust-busting" laws and union movements of the early 20th.
I fell hard for FORTH in the mid-80's - it was the programming language of some instrumentation I had to work with. I never did program the instrumentation, but got all the books on the language and interpreters/compilers (the distinction blurs in FORTH...) for it for a number of computers. I did some useful utilities for the PC using "HS/FORTH". I benchmarked it against some other solutions for a course in comparitive computer languages about 1985, and for heavily stack-based (ie very recursive) programs, nothing could touch it. I'm talking QuickSort faster than C.
But I have to admit: though I busted butt, re-writing and re-re-writing programs to make them as clear and readable as possible, though I re-read the remarkable "Thinking FORTH" by Leo Brodie many times (and would recommend it to anybody who wants to understand the craft of programming, whether they want to learn FORTH or not)....despite it all, most of my FORTH programs were hard to read a few months later.
There were things it was really good at - that is, the programs WERE readable later, the problem and language were a match - and others where I could just not seem to decompose the problem into FORTH words that fitted well together without a lot of "glue" to manipulate the parameters on the stack.
That was the most frequent problem with my FORTH programming - one ends up trying to manage several parameters on the stack and doing a lot of stack "DUP SWAP ROTATE" - actions to line up the parameters to hand to the next word. I would re-compose the words and the parameters they wanted to clean up some code, and find I'd made some other code all hard to read.
FORTH was also profoundly command-line oriented, and when the word went all GUI-centric on me with no good "Visual FORTH" or "Tk/FORTH" on the horizon, I slipped from grace. I can't see getting back to it now, either; lets face it, a huge bonus for any programming language choice is its popularity, so that others will maintain your code, so that you can get help and code fragments with a quick google.
But I still think that FORTH should be a completely MANDATORY learning experience in all University and Tech CompSci degrees. You can jump from C to Perl to Python far more easily than to FORTH - it really comes at problems from another angle and working with it for years has been an enormous asset to my non-linear thinking when it comes to problem-solving.
And perhaps if more students learned it, FORTH would rise in popularity for some problems, out of its decades-long sinecure in embedded systems (it started off programming radio telescopes, and undoubtedly still does...) Since it is inherently object-oriented (yes, an assembler-sized OO language from the 1970's, you heard that correctly) it would be an excellent interpretive, experimentation-friendly scripting language for applications. I'm currently needing to do a lot of VBA in Excel at work, and I have a strong suspicion I'd be twice as productive in "FORTH for Applications". It's a tragedy Bill Gates fell for BASIC (of all languages) instead.
Argh. Those were actually the personal tax rates. Corporate info was in the next paragraph.
"In the Eisenhower era, corporations paid an average 25 percent of the federal tax bill; they paid only 10 percent in 2000 and 7 percent in 2001. The effective tax rate on corporate income amounted to 47 percent in 1960; it is only 35 percent today (before tax credits). Closing the most egregious shelters and returning to the 1960 tax rate could increase annual revenues by $110 billion. "
The whole notion that an increase in tax on corporations make the corporation unprofitable rests on the assumption that ONLY that one corporation sees its tax bill go up. If they ALL go up, then all that happens is that the tax is passed on in the form of higher prices for goods and services..except for corporations that have been making very high profits. They are taxed more, so the relative jump is higher and they may be forced to give up some of those high profits to stay competitive with corporations that have been scraping by on the usual 8%.
Hel-lo, Microsoft! You just got less competitive with RedHat and SuSE.
That oughta sell slashdot right there.
For all those predicting total economic disaster if corporate tax rates increase (and explaining that all these corporations must locate to the Caymans because the cost of compliance is just unendurable), note some stats from an article in The Nation from 2003:
"Currently, the top marginal tax rate is 38.6 percent, scheduled to drop to 35 percent by 2006. ... The top marginal rate was: ...neither historical period is noted for the flight of corporations from the US.
91 percent to and through the Eisenhower years, indeed continuing up to 1964;
70 percent from 1965 to 1981; 50 percent from 1982 through 1986 (for the first Reagan Administration)."
>>BSc in Physics. The job market doesn't seem to indicate any such need...at least not for anything below the Ph.D level
Funny, that's what I was told at the age of 17 by the head of the Physics department when my 98 in Physics made me figure I should take it in the University. (He did mention a BSc in physics might get you a job as a meteorologist...but this was 1975.)
I took engineering.
I'm afraid when I said "chemists, physicists, biologists" I was referring to PhDs the whole way. I think the original question in this item was about the guy's PhD specialty.
There was an article in Maclean's (our Newsweek) about a pure-science institute having trouble recruiting in the 90's and 00's because "an entire generation of physicists, chemists and biologists went into Finance instead".
The "quant" maths haven't been proven wrong, exactly; whether heavy mathematical analysis and modelling can make markets more efficient and lower-friction is a separate question from the morals of those managing them.
The trouble is, baroque complexity of financial instruments and transactions was the primary concealment tool that allowed all the lying in the first place - lying to other institutions, to regulators, and certainly to the public that handed over all their dough at low interest because the institutions were so guaranteed-safe; and I suspect, they managed to lie to themselves. Models - especially complex ones with many parameters - have a way of reflecting all the prejudices of (and pressures on) the developers. A big part of the scientific method is about systematically counteracting that. There is way less pressure to counteract if you are not working for open publication after a rigorous peer-review. If your models will be strictest trade secrets, however, your only reviewer is your boss - who may personally become hugely wealthy if the model says X, and not much, if it says Y. Science (as in, "the search for truth") suffers.
If nobody, for a generation or two, will trust an institution with opaquely complex business methods, the market for quants is going to stay "plummeted" for a long time. (It has already plummeted because of the contraction in the whole finance industry - I presume you are even asking about this career only because you think there will again be some job openings in 4 years when you complete a degree.)
I think even 4 years from now, there will still be surplus quants littering the weak market; resumes in the hundreds will flood in for openings.
So, stay away from THAT career, job-wise. There's a crying need for physicists, chemists, and biologists.
1) Government regulation (and enforcement) setting minimum working conditions.
2) Enthusiastic uptake of some kind of "no humans were exploited in the making of this product" sticker, in the free market.
I've found it heartwarming at work that the younger staff are all hugely in favour of "fair trade" products that purportedly don't exploit poor farmers and farm labourers, mostly as applied to coffee and sugar products. The aggressively seek them out and we have people coming from floors around to our "fair trade only" coffee station. We older folks are "for" this stuff as long as you stick it under our noses, shame us a bit, and it doesn't cost *much* more.
Which it doesn't, of course - that's the pathetic thing about these stories - the conditions in that factory, as opposed to conditions that might not pass muster here but at least wouldn't *disgust* you, are probably scraping $2 off the cost of the $60 "MS Egronomic 4000" keyboard that you could only pry from my cold, dead (non-RSI'd) fingers. I'd be happy to pay $65 if it came with such a sticker...the other $3 paying for the checking and enforcement of the rules from the sticker-issuing NGO.
Sigh. I repeat, I don't know why I bother.
Yes, I too can choose from cable, multiple DSL offerings from different companies, and 3G services. Canada has all of that, perhaps you have us confused with North Korea. I'm not talking about that.
Look it up. The term "natural monopolies" means "natural", not "government created". It refers to things like road networks where putting in two of them would be prohibitively expensive; the infrastructure is only affordable AT ALL because it serves everybody. (Also, with roads, exactly where would you put the second competitive network so it didn't intersect with the first? All Underground?)
I work for a water/sewer utility; you can argue about privatizing us, but you can't argue that it would ever pay anybody to put in a second set of water & sewer pipes in order to compete with us. (total length of water, sewer & storm systems: 8400 miles; installation cost: $9 billion; number of people to spread this out over: 1M; cost per 2.5 person household: $23,000, or 19 years of its water/sewer bills. Then try paying for the plants. And our operations costs.)
I think you'll find that your 5 (or 55) DSL suppliers all use the same set of wires; I don't know of a city with two sets of phone wires all the way to the house. Your "competitive" companies can only be competitive within a narrow range of add-on services over and above what they all must pay to the telco that owns those wires.
The discovery that both the 1930's phone wires and the 1970's television cable wires could both carry internet did create a first: two networks to each house that can provide the same service. But, alas, despite the fact that these are quite different technologies and network problems and infrastructure ages, and SHOULD have had different prices, the price for Internet in most places with both DSL and cable is quite similar between the two. Both are, of course, charging all the traffic will bear, because only two competitors isn't very competitive. I believe economists are very skeptical of competive environments with fewer than six vendors.
Even if projects to put in wireless competition and a whole third network of fiber, were not routinely shut down by (privately-owned) monopolies (I don't recall any government-owned telcos doing so), they wouldn't be "enough" comptition to really establish a free market. (Yes...fiber is coming: but from your phone company to replace its copper. Still a monopoly.)
So...we're stuck with monopolies. They can be public, partially so, or wholly private; and they can be tightly regulated, even subsidized, or not very regulated. Different countries are trying different strategies.
And the US strategy is clearly falling behind those of many other countries. Even, yes, Canada.
I'm sorry, I don't want to insult your religion; I'm just stating economic and technical facts.