The author is the son-half of a father/son duo, Dan and Jerry Hutcheson, that wrote an article for Scientific American in 1996 on the expected coming end of Moore's Law, say around 2003-2005. It was one of the many that Intel liked to deride as they pushed on down below the wavelength of high-ultraviolet light in their form factors, a remarkable achievement. And no doubt, Hutcheson will be in for more mocking about how Moore's will continue until we're using subatomic particles.
But for me, Moore's ended around the 2003-2005 they predicted. My big IT interest isn't phones and low-power computing, where Moore's is continuing - yes, possibly for longer than Hutcheson predicts -- but in raw desktop performance at number-crunching big databases. There's been progress there since 2005, but most of it has come from faster memory, SSDs, more cores. Raw horsepower progress continued, even exponentially - but not at a 2-year doubling after about 2005, it was more like 3, 4, then 5 years. I should have titled this, "Moore's law has been winding down for a decade, for many".
The new "Skylake" generation of i7's is mostly about low-power progress. A genuine jump for us power users is coming in the fall, I think, after a couple of years since the last one...and the chips should be 15% or 20% faster than 2014's. Just not like the late 90s and doublings every year or two.
I also write notes to people, like this one, with the usual amount of English that isn't really necessary - like a quarter of the words in this sentence.
A certain amount of redundancy in communication is still around, though, yes, languages tend to drop and slur words over the centuries. Interestingly, military communications, where you'd think speed was very important, tend to be written quite formally, that is to say, with lots of that redundant English. Turns out that clarity is even more important than speed when lives are on the line!
I bet that your really important code that runs SCADA and other real-word systems has the most ponderous, overstated, tedious and obvious code of all. The same way that surgeons say, "Hand me the #3 rib spreader" rather than "Gimme that" while gesturing in a general direction.
Actually declaring and destroying your variables - stating what they are in clear, rather than by implication, and making clear when they are no longer needed - should be considered documentation for the programmers, even if the mechanism will perform identically without it.
The ascent engine had its own fuel tank. The descent engine, it's fuel, and the whole lower half of the LM were left on the lunar surface. The complete loss of fuel before the LM was landed would only have necessitated leaving before landing, triggering the ascent engine while still above ground.
> What telecoms — correctly — object to, are efforts by local governments to compete with them....yeah, they don't permit competition from their subsidiaries.
If that were something besides pro-telecom BS, there would be more than two competing businesses, individuals, or non-profits in most American markets. America's the Land of Entrepreneurs - you don't think anybody in America had this guy's idea? Those folks were almost all shut down, generally by clubbing them with a compliant government that works for the industry.
So we always have just the two offerings, who have, mysteriously, the same price, though they use completely different infrastructures. Just like TV happens to cost the same whether delivered by cables that were paid off by the early 90s, or satellites 40,000km overhead. What are the odds such different technologies would cost exactly the same to the consumer?
Bottom line, you don't get to use the "compete" word about the telecom, cable, or internet industries in the US. They are not competitive, compared to world-wide figures, because they simply do not compete with each other; they divide up markets, send each other signals as to the common price, and enjoy high profits as rentiers who own an oligopoly.
The Spanish market is competitive, *by comparison*, and yet it's massive companies that should be able to beat a bunch of hobbyist amateurs with their economies of scale and PhDs by the squad...but instead the hobbyist amateurs are beating them at their own game. Because even they are not all that competitive.
When there are more than six providers competing in a marketplace, you can use the "C" word to describe the situation; so says classic economics theory as confirmed by many, many observations in many markets for many products. Fewer than six, and they don't have to meet in a smoke-filled room to agree on pricing; the signals are sent in the pricings themselves, and fewer than six can quietly agree not to get cut-throat.
Economist Manu Saadia recently wrote "Trekonomics" about the supposed economics of the ST Earth back home. There was a panel discussion at a con featuring Saadia's friend Paul Krugman and Chris Black, a writer for ST: Enterprise. He was asked what the writers were thinking the character's motivations were in a post-scarcity economy and begged off: in short, it never crossed their minds. Neither set of writers gave a care for why the background they needed for their story was the way it was, any more than the guy painting a backdrop of a hilly landscape for a play cares about the geology that produced the landscape.
Cheer up. Storing (collecting, stacking, housing, guarding, insuring) 5000 terminals for 15 years would probably cost more than $25,000 per year, which with interest would negate your $500,000 in today's value. *People* in their homes can make use of "unused storage area" in their basements (until the basement is a horror) to keep around something that'll be maybe useful way down the line, but corporations can't afford to. Save that you could keep a few bits of equipment stashed in your own office area, like everybody.
It's not about equality between rich and poor, it's about equality between different forms of free government handouts. All forms of free handouts should be subject to the same tests, that's all. And the new law would also affect both rich and poor alike. Everybody who uses *itemized deductions* would be affected. The poor can do that; they just rarely bother. That's dumb, but at least it will spare them drug testing. And the rich can avoid the drug testing by just not bothering with those itemized deductions.
I'm reading arguments that the USA should indeed have this as a natural possession, because they are the best, most moral and/or effective steward.
Irrelevant.
Americans would never accept somebody else's opinion that, say, Canada should regulate the US finance system because our banks never went under or needed bailouts; the argument that Canadians were more responsible stewards of a national financial system would cut no ice at all, despite being objectively true.
Governance - of anything - draws legitimacy from the consent of those governed, not some arbitrary opinion of how much merit it has.
The argument that "I must be in charge because I'm the best guy for the job and the need is great" has been used by every dictator.
...forever wary. I did months of work in, I hope I have the version number right, VB 3. That would be about 1997. VB4 comes out, and my VB3 program just won't load into it; there don't even seem to be conversion tools worth using, easier to start again. My program had served about 70% of its purpose, so we just kept it running a little longer and ditched it entirely. But the only proprietary environment I ever again coded in was VBA for Excel, which I correctly surmised they had almost no ability to break with non-compatibility because of the backlash. None of the VB stuff in the nineties was for major corporate applications and it was mostly user-department small apps that were sabotaged. But spreadsheets, man, those often run the business. Anyway, my little user-department apps now all in Perl and so forth, are often still running (I'm retired) in their late teens and early 20s. The IT department applications, which did stick with MS all the way, through VB6 and.Net and C#....all had to be rewritten every 4-5 years as MS switched their recommended product for major corporate programming. And everybody had to buy new MS software, but importantly, spend 100X as much re-writing.
I watched that the whole last 18 years, marvelling that anybody would have their development environment depend on a corporation whose interests are SO divorced from theirs that they'd inflict a million-dollar rewrite on them just to sell $10,000 worth of software.
Very senior DoD official was finally pushed out of his own job, protecting whistleblowers, because he kept, you know, trying to protect whistleblowers. He's now testifying that multiple senior officials broke the law in at least three ways to abuse and ruin Thomas Drake, the guy whose fate caused Snowden to practice civil disobedience.
...but I have few hopes it will. It would be nice if those who utter all that stuff about:
* "real heroes don't run away to hide behind foreign powers"
* "he's a coward for not standing on his rights and facing justice"
* "he should have worked through the system and not broken the law, he's a criminal"...would now shut up and even apologize. When the entity you are blowing the whistle on, itself breaks the law - fraudulently and unlawfully uses the colour of authority to protect itself from embarrassment rather than serving the public trust - then you can no longer depend on the justice system. They have more access to its levers than the whistleblower, so the justice system is not neutral, not blind, in his case.
They are captured, in effect, by the prestige of the institution, and the numbers. What is the court supposed to believe about a complex internal matter, the one whistleblower, or the Secretary, three Undersecretaries, four generals and five lawyers, all insisting that you are a crazed, grudge-bearing criminal?
Nothing prevents a large bureaucracy from abusing the simple fact that courts trust them, except the bureaucracy's own members' obedience to the law and fear of eventual exposure. That works, mostly, for the local Roads department, or even the State environmental department. With the NSA, it will never, ever happen; the NSA brass need fear no exposure, ever. Clapper's brazen perjury before Congress (without consequences) is proof that Snowden had to run.
Harshly stated, but there's a fair question here about whether the NSA looked long and hard for somebody who had both "civil liberties credentials" and a predisposition to be swayed by their arguments. And only that guy, chosen from hundreds, got the job. It's expensive searching for him, but its "credibility gold" and worth the money.
Also, I would put the housing boom down more to more people wanting single-family-detached and wanting *ownership* rather than apartment rental. Ownership had both psych value (it passes down from the Depression era and is carried in by many immigrants that ownership of home and a yard you can garden provides independence in times of poor economy) and real value, in that the bubble made them look like by far the best investments available to lower-middle-class: what do they know about whether Lyft will beat Uber? But they know housing has gone up for decades.
And people who don't understand it was tried for several thousand years. No, seriously.
I can't think of any better descriptions of feudalism than the concentration of what little mobile wealth there was into 0.01%, who then proceed to kill each other over those spoils, ad infinitum. Look how few noble houses really made it more than 3 or 4 generations. Skim down the "92 hereditary members" of the British House of Lords and note how few of the "th" numbers are in the teens...and of course we're several generations away from real feudalism there now. Mostly, noble houses killed each other off; if not totally, then so that individual lines had no male heirs and the title started with a new "the 1st".
You know the rest: there was ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS somebody up for the job of "guy who basically owns nearly everything in the county". You'd never, ever run out. If "Game of Thrones" (I mean, knowing it's based on histories more than fantasies) doesn't clear that up, "The Walking Dead" clarifies that somebody is up for the job of "Local 1%" even if there's less than 100 people left.
...if I've got my Latin right. I can think of a lot worse people to betray than the US Marines.
Now, calm down; I don't mean betrayal as in letting the Ironborn into Winterfell, I mean as in "Just Go Microsoft for all your software and everything will work together and incidentally, our OS won't sabotage our own applications, your experience with others may vary." And so mighty Lotus 123 and WordPerfect were cast into the lake of red ink; those who switched away from them incurred painful costs. Large bureaucratic IT departments weren't certain that MS could or would sabotage Lotus and WordPerfect, but MS stuff was about as good, so why take a chance?...and then they got exactly the same quality of software, arguably poorer, than if they'd stayed in a multi-vendor environment, and then the wonderful Windows OS hit a high point at the start of the 21st century and has been decaying in cost/benefit ratio ever since. The people who switched got nothing for it but exploited, and now this.
Sorry, old rant of course. It was just funny to read about how the military were milked like docile cows. When you're being presented with only one "rational" move after another, as carefully arranged for you, most military planners can spot an enemy manipulating them, not a friend helping them. At that point in military engagements, you have to NOT do the "rational" thing as it simply leads down a garden path to your execution. You have to kick over the card table, and take a risk...because the "low risk" option is really just a show to take you to the kill zone.
The military industrial complex is big enough to give Microsoft orders. They could have kept their heterogeneous environment and hinted that any trouble getting applications to work with it would result in them simply spending a billion in government money to create MilWin or some such.
Microsoft could have been brought to heel. But nope, the mighty Marines instead bent over and took it like men.
The much-discussed article about automation that was very good was in The Atlantic a few years back: http://www.theatlantic.com/mag... [theatlantic.com]...which dramatized the disappearance of manufacturing jobs with the story of young, smart Maddie Parker, who alas, did not get a post-secondary education. Her job was not quite automated yet, but was certainly next to go. She moved a machine part from A to B in the factory and got it set up for the next machine to handle. That job took more than two years of her salary to automate, and that was the economic criterion for it. Her job would go as soon as it got another 10 or 20 percent cheaper to automate.
And automation keeps getting cheaper to do, for more and more complex tasks. I'm not sure if the rate-of-change is a Moore's-Law-type exponential, because I'm not sure what the metric would be - but there's no question that automation is marching up the value-line, automating harder and harder jobs that pay more and more.
So the "minimum wage" component of this story only changed the outcome by a couple of years. The owners hardly said "we would never have done this if minimum wage were still $8"; they'd have done it a few years later, that's all.
They're just the kind of people to really hate minimum wage laws, and figured they'd take a shot at them in passing, though they're just not relevant to the larger story.
As soon as the corporation licensing the franchise is clear that they can raise franchise fees without putting them out of business, they will. The franchise fees will ALWAYS be the amount not quite able to put them out of business. That's how the last franchise fee amount was chosen. There is no combination of circumstances that can raise the profits for the workers - and the franchise owner IS a worker, everybody knows the owners work like dogs to hold down those same staff costs. Everything they make, minus what they need to eat, will always be taken away.
Friend of mine was an absolute wizard in a darkroom - amazing colour perception and memory, an instinct for chemicals/timing combinations that would bring out contrast in bad images. When most darkroom work was automated, his was not - developing large-process prints of airphotos in false colours, that kind of specialty work. But finally all that was gone too, when electronic images started to beat the best that chemicals could do even for specialty needs.
He was past 50 by then, a death-zone for a career break, much less starting an all-new one. But he managed it! Those airphotos led him to the people who make them, and he wound up running the 80-lb supercamera in the plane, certified to all the electronic imaging high-tech of that, plus had to be certified as aircrew. It was actually a better job than his old one...and lasted just a few years before that work started drying up.
Drones can't hold a level flight as well as a human pilot, and they thought that would keep human crews going another decade, but image processing now lets them take an image taken at several degrees off-level and straighten it out again, even to the high standards of airphoto imagery. So his SECOND career just got overtaken by technology at 57.
The sad thing here is that the benefits to society are very diffuse indeed...the cost of taking airphotos affects planning of many things and planning-costs are a part of a lot of overall societal costs. So a whole long list of things become a percent (at most) cheaper out of this...but a whole bunch of easily identifiable people lose 100% of income. In many cases, like my friend at 57, replacing that borders on impossible.
But nevermind drone airplanes. Drone vehicles are going to be the *gargantuan* job-killer.
Most of Apple's value isn't in those foreign banks, or in domestic ones. It's quite invisible to bankers if not to marketers. It's Apple's rather remarkable reputation and the willingness of so very many people to believe that it's worth paying Apple $500 for functionality others will sell you for $300.
Getting people pissed at Apple to save a few tax dollars is like throwing out the car money to save the milk money. But it's the kind of incredibly, obviously stupid shit that megabuck CEOs do all the time, their eyes on the end of the year, not the end of the decade.
I'm OK with great transparency of the citizens to the police, if they get warrants. As long as there's great transparency of the police to the citizens, if we make polite requests to know exactly where they were and what they were saying every minute they were on the clock.
They should be bugged all the time and the data available for retroactive viewing. That's harsh - I'd hate it on my job - but policing is a very high calling and they carry deadly weapons in our name...and, oh, yeah, they have the power to surveill any of us on request now, because our lives are computer-mediated and they've reserved the right to access all those records that didn't use to even exist.
That's given them vastly expanded powers to do their job (for us! hooray! This wing-bandit was caught and his stupid gun taken away! Yay!) but power breeds trouble and it justifies an enhanced surveillance...of the police. Sorry guys.
Slashdot Mirror
In contrast to Americans that moved to Mexico, and then moved its border a long way south and started calling it the USA?
The author is the son-half of a father/son duo, Dan and Jerry Hutcheson, that wrote an article for Scientific American in 1996 on the expected coming end of Moore's Law, say around 2003-2005. It was one of the many that Intel liked to deride as they pushed on down below the wavelength of high-ultraviolet light in their form factors, a remarkable achievement.
And no doubt, Hutcheson will be in for more mocking about how Moore's will continue until we're using subatomic particles.
But for me, Moore's ended around the 2003-2005 they predicted. My big IT interest isn't phones and low-power computing, where Moore's is continuing - yes, possibly for longer than Hutcheson predicts -- but in raw desktop performance at number-crunching big databases. There's been progress there since 2005, but most of it has come from faster memory, SSDs, more cores. Raw horsepower progress continued, even exponentially - but not at a 2-year doubling after about 2005, it was more like 3, 4, then 5 years. I should have titled this, "Moore's law has been winding down for a decade, for many".
The new "Skylake" generation of i7's is mostly about low-power progress. A genuine jump for us power users is coming in the fall, I think, after a couple of years since the last one...and the chips should be 15% or 20% faster than 2014's. Just not like the late 90s and doublings every year or two.
I also write notes to people, like this one, with the usual amount of English that isn't really necessary - like a quarter of the words in this sentence.
A certain amount of redundancy in communication is still around, though, yes, languages tend to drop and slur words over the centuries. Interestingly, military communications, where you'd think speed was very important, tend to be written quite formally, that is to say, with lots of that redundant English. Turns out that clarity is even more important than speed when lives are on the line!
I bet that your really important code that runs SCADA and other real-word systems has the most ponderous, overstated, tedious and obvious code of all. The same way that surgeons say, "Hand me the #3 rib spreader" rather than "Gimme that" while gesturing in a general direction.
Actually declaring and destroying your variables - stating what they are in clear, rather than by implication, and making clear when they are no longer needed - should be considered documentation for the programmers, even if the mechanism will perform identically without it.
The ascent engine had its own fuel tank. The descent engine, it's fuel, and the whole lower half of the LM were left on the lunar surface. The complete loss of fuel before the LM was landed would only have necessitated leaving before landing, triggering the ascent engine while still above ground.
> What telecoms — correctly — object to, are efforts by local governments to compete with them. ...yeah, they don't permit competition from their subsidiaries.
If that were something besides pro-telecom BS, there would be more than two competing businesses, individuals, or non-profits in most American markets. America's the Land of Entrepreneurs - you don't think anybody in America had this guy's idea? Those folks were almost all shut down, generally by clubbing them with a compliant government that works for the industry.
So we always have just the two offerings, who have, mysteriously, the same price, though they use completely different infrastructures. Just like TV happens to cost the same whether delivered by cables that were paid off by the early 90s, or satellites 40,000km overhead. What are the odds such different technologies would cost exactly the same to the consumer?
Bottom line, you don't get to use the "compete" word about the telecom, cable, or internet industries in the US. They are not competitive, compared to world-wide figures, because they simply do not compete with each other; they divide up markets, send each other signals as to the common price, and enjoy high profits as rentiers who own an oligopoly.
The Spanish market is competitive, *by comparison*, and yet it's massive companies that should be able to beat a bunch of hobbyist amateurs with their economies of scale and PhDs by the squad...but instead the hobbyist amateurs are beating them at their own game. Because even they are not all that competitive.
When there are more than six providers competing in a marketplace, you can use the "C" word to describe the situation; so says classic economics theory as confirmed by many, many observations in many markets for many products. Fewer than six, and they don't have to meet in a smoke-filled room to agree on pricing; the signals are sent in the pricings themselves, and fewer than six can quietly agree not to get cut-throat.
Too Stupid; Didn't Read
Economist Manu Saadia recently wrote "Trekonomics" about the supposed economics of the ST Earth back home. There was a panel discussion at a con featuring Saadia's friend Paul Krugman and Chris Black, a writer for ST: Enterprise. He was asked what the writers were thinking the character's motivations were in a post-scarcity economy and begged off: in short, it never crossed their minds.
Neither set of writers gave a care for why the background they needed for their story was the way it was, any more than the guy painting a backdrop of a hilly landscape for a play cares about the geology that produced the landscape.
Cheer up. Storing (collecting, stacking, housing, guarding, insuring) 5000 terminals for 15 years would probably cost more than $25,000 per year, which with interest would negate your $500,000 in today's value.
*People* in their homes can make use of "unused storage area" in their basements (until the basement is a horror) to keep around something that'll be maybe useful way down the line, but corporations can't afford to. Save that you could keep a few bits of equipment stashed in your own office area, like everybody.
It's not about equality between rich and poor, it's about equality between different forms of free government handouts. All forms of free handouts should be subject to the same tests, that's all.
And the new law would also affect both rich and poor alike. Everybody who uses *itemized deductions* would be affected. The poor can do that; they just rarely bother. That's dumb, but at least it will spare them drug testing. And the rich can avoid the drug testing by just not bothering with those itemized deductions.
I'm reading arguments that the USA should indeed have this as a natural possession, because they are the best, most moral and/or effective steward.
Irrelevant.
Americans would never accept somebody else's opinion that, say, Canada should regulate the US finance system because our banks never went under or needed bailouts; the argument that Canadians were more responsible stewards of a national financial system would cut no ice at all, despite being objectively true.
Governance - of anything - draws legitimacy from the consent of those governed, not some arbitrary opinion of how much merit it has.
The argument that "I must be in charge because I'm the best guy for the job and the need is great" has been used by every dictator.
...forever wary. .Net and C#....all had to be rewritten every 4-5 years as MS switched their recommended product for major corporate programming. And everybody had to buy new MS software, but importantly, spend 100X as much re-writing.
I did months of work in, I hope I have the version number right, VB 3. That would be about 1997. VB4 comes out, and my VB3 program just won't load into it; there don't even seem to be conversion tools worth using, easier to start again. My program had served about 70% of its purpose, so we just kept it running a little longer and ditched it entirely.
But the only proprietary environment I ever again coded in was VBA for Excel, which I correctly surmised they had almost no ability to break with non-compatibility because of the backlash. None of the VB stuff in the nineties was for major corporate applications and it was mostly user-department small apps that were sabotaged. But spreadsheets, man, those often run the business.
Anyway, my little user-department apps now all in Perl and so forth, are often still running (I'm retired) in their late teens and early 20s. The IT department applications, which did stick with MS all the way, through VB6 and
I watched that the whole last 18 years, marvelling that anybody would have their development environment depend on a corporation whose interests are SO divorced from theirs that they'd inflict a million-dollar rewrite on them just to sell $10,000 worth of software.
Sure, what's five orders of magnitude between friends.
...I think a judge has to rule that it IS fair use, to render copyright "meaningless". He's just sore the judge ruled that way.
There's something funny in there about COBOL surviving because it has object inheritance going for it.
And just one day later:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-...
Very senior DoD official was finally pushed out of his own job, protecting whistleblowers, because he kept, you know, trying to protect whistleblowers. He's now testifying that multiple senior officials broke the law in at least three ways to abuse and ruin Thomas Drake, the guy whose fate caused Snowden to practice civil disobedience.
...but I have few hopes it will. It would be nice if those who utter all that stuff about:
* "real heroes don't run away to hide behind foreign powers"
* "he's a coward for not standing on his rights and facing justice"
* "he should have worked through the system and not broken the law, he's a criminal" ...would now shut up and even apologize. When the entity you are blowing the whistle on, itself breaks the law - fraudulently and unlawfully uses the colour of authority to protect itself from embarrassment rather than serving the public trust - then you can no longer depend on the justice system. They have more access to its levers than the whistleblower, so the justice system is not neutral, not blind, in his case.
They are captured, in effect, by the prestige of the institution, and the numbers. What is the court supposed to believe about a complex internal matter, the one whistleblower, or the Secretary, three Undersecretaries, four generals and five lawyers, all insisting that you are a crazed, grudge-bearing criminal?
Nothing prevents a large bureaucracy from abusing the simple fact that courts trust them, except the bureaucracy's own members' obedience to the law and fear of eventual exposure. That works, mostly, for the local Roads department, or even the State environmental department. With the NSA, it will never, ever happen; the NSA brass need fear no exposure, ever. Clapper's brazen perjury before Congress (without consequences) is proof that Snowden had to run.
Harshly stated, but there's a fair question here about whether the NSA looked long and hard for somebody who had both "civil liberties credentials" and a predisposition to be swayed by their arguments. And only that guy, chosen from hundreds, got the job. It's expensive searching for him, but its "credibility gold" and worth the money.
Not forgetting the 30% drop in number of people in the house, I trust:
http://www.statista.com/statis...
Also, I would put the housing boom down more to more people wanting single-family-detached and wanting *ownership* rather than apartment rental. Ownership had both psych value (it passes down from the Depression era and is carried in by many immigrants that ownership of home and a yard you can garden provides independence in times of poor economy) and real value, in that the bubble made them look like by far the best investments available to lower-middle-class: what do they know about whether Lyft will beat Uber? But they know housing has gone up for decades.
And people who don't understand it was tried for several thousand years. No, seriously.
I can't think of any better descriptions of feudalism than the concentration of what little mobile wealth there was into 0.01%, who then proceed to kill each other over those spoils, ad infinitum. Look how few noble houses really made it more than 3 or 4 generations. Skim down the "92 hereditary members" of the British House of Lords and note how few of the "th" numbers are in the teens...and of course we're several generations away from real feudalism there now. Mostly, noble houses killed each other off; if not totally, then so that individual lines had no male heirs and the title started with a new "the 1st".
You know the rest: there was ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS somebody up for the job of "guy who basically owns nearly everything in the county". You'd never, ever run out. If "Game of Thrones" (I mean, knowing it's based on histories more than fantasies) doesn't clear that up, "The Walking Dead" clarifies that somebody is up for the job of "Local 1%" even if there's less than 100 people left.
...if I've got my Latin right. I can think of a lot worse people to betray than the US Marines.
Now, calm down; I don't mean betrayal as in letting the Ironborn into Winterfell, I mean as in "Just Go Microsoft for all your software and everything will work together and incidentally, our OS won't sabotage our own applications, your experience with others may vary." And so mighty Lotus 123 and WordPerfect were cast into the lake of red ink; those who switched away from them incurred painful costs. Large bureaucratic IT departments weren't certain that MS could or would sabotage Lotus and WordPerfect, but MS stuff was about as good, so why take a chance? ...and then they got exactly the same quality of software, arguably poorer, than if they'd stayed in a multi-vendor environment, and then the wonderful Windows OS hit a high point at the start of the 21st century and has been decaying in cost/benefit ratio ever since. The people who switched got nothing for it but exploited, and now this.
Sorry, old rant of course. It was just funny to read about how the military were milked like docile cows. When you're being presented with only one "rational" move after another, as carefully arranged for you, most military planners can spot an enemy manipulating them, not a friend helping them. At that point in military engagements, you have to NOT do the "rational" thing as it simply leads down a garden path to your execution. You have to kick over the card table, and take a risk...because the "low risk" option is really just a show to take you to the kill zone.
The military industrial complex is big enough to give Microsoft orders. They could have kept their heterogeneous environment and hinted that any trouble getting applications to work with it would result in them simply spending a billion in government money to create MilWin or some such.
Microsoft could have been brought to heel. But nope, the mighty Marines instead bent over and took it like men.
The much-discussed article about automation that was very good was in The Atlantic a few years back: ...which dramatized the disappearance of manufacturing jobs with the story of young, smart Maddie Parker, who alas, did not get a post-secondary education. Her job was not quite automated yet, but was certainly next to go. She moved a machine part from A to B in the factory and got it set up for the next machine to handle. That job took more than two years of her salary to automate, and that was the economic criterion for it. Her job would go as soon as it got another 10 or 20 percent cheaper to automate.
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag... [theatlantic.com]
And automation keeps getting cheaper to do, for more and more complex tasks. I'm not sure if the rate-of-change is a Moore's-Law-type exponential, because I'm not sure what the metric would be - but there's no question that automation is marching up the value-line, automating harder and harder jobs that pay more and more.
So the "minimum wage" component of this story only changed the outcome by a couple of years. The owners hardly said "we would never have done this if minimum wage were still $8"; they'd have done it a few years later, that's all.
They're just the kind of people to really hate minimum wage laws, and figured they'd take a shot at them in passing, though they're just not relevant to the larger story.
As soon as the corporation licensing the franchise is clear that they can raise franchise fees without putting them out of business, they will.
The franchise fees will ALWAYS be the amount not quite able to put them out of business. That's how the last franchise fee amount was chosen. There is no combination of circumstances that can raise the profits for the workers - and the franchise owner IS a worker, everybody knows the owners work like dogs to hold down those same staff costs. Everything they make, minus what they need to eat, will always be taken away.
Friend of mine was an absolute wizard in a darkroom - amazing colour perception and memory, an instinct for chemicals/timing combinations that would bring out contrast in bad images. When most darkroom work was automated, his was not - developing large-process prints of airphotos in false colours, that kind of specialty work. But finally all that was gone too, when electronic images started to beat the best that chemicals could do even for specialty needs.
He was past 50 by then, a death-zone for a career break, much less starting an all-new one. But he managed it! Those airphotos led him to the people who make them, and he wound up running the 80-lb supercamera in the plane, certified to all the electronic imaging high-tech of that, plus had to be certified as aircrew. It was actually a better job than his old one...and lasted just a few years before that work started drying up.
Drones can't hold a level flight as well as a human pilot, and they thought that would keep human crews going another decade, but image processing now lets them take an image taken at several degrees off-level and straighten it out again, even to the high standards of airphoto imagery. So his SECOND career just got overtaken by technology at 57.
The sad thing here is that the benefits to society are very diffuse indeed...the cost of taking airphotos affects planning of many things and planning-costs are a part of a lot of overall societal costs. So a whole long list of things become a percent (at most) cheaper out of this...but a whole bunch of easily identifiable people lose 100% of income. In many cases, like my friend at 57, replacing that borders on impossible.
But nevermind drone airplanes. Drone vehicles are going to be the *gargantuan* job-killer.
Most of Apple's value isn't in those foreign banks, or in domestic ones. It's quite invisible to bankers if not to marketers. It's Apple's rather remarkable reputation and the willingness of so very many people to believe that it's worth paying Apple $500 for functionality others will sell you for $300.
Getting people pissed at Apple to save a few tax dollars is like throwing out the car money to save the milk money. But it's the kind of incredibly, obviously stupid shit that megabuck CEOs do all the time, their eyes on the end of the year, not the end of the decade.
I'm OK with great transparency of the citizens to the police, if they get warrants. As long as there's great transparency of the police to the citizens, if we make polite requests to know exactly where they were and what they were saying every minute they were on the clock.
They should be bugged all the time and the data available for retroactive viewing. That's harsh - I'd hate it on my job - but policing is a very high calling and they carry deadly weapons in our name...and, oh, yeah, they have the power to surveill any of us on request now, because our lives are computer-mediated and they've reserved the right to access all those records that didn't use to even exist.
That's given them vastly expanded powers to do their job (for us! hooray! This wing-bandit was caught and his stupid gun taken away! Yay!) but power breeds trouble and it justifies an enhanced surveillance...of the police. Sorry guys.