The one thing I'm NOT reading here is "What's wrong with a W10 upgrade?". For a while there, Microsoft was batting nearly 1000 - Win95, 98 and the NT that was there by 1999 were all improvements on the previous version. Everybody upgraded happily. Then it was like Star Trek movies, with every second one sucking, like ME and 2000. And now, with 8, 8.1 and 10, MS seems to be on a losing streak. I heard some good things about 10 at first, but they've trailed off in a litany of complaints; the negatives clearly outweigh the few positives. My employer was one of the ones that hung on to XP a long time - I think we were only fully to Win 7 by two years ago. The notion of another corporate-wide upgrade for 4000 machines is so exhausting that it's not even on the timetable, there's no budget to even start preliminary testing. If the big corporate buyers that are their mainstay are no longer upgrading, it means new capabilities aren't going to appear. They're going to be outpaced by other options. They've lost the momentum, the initiative.
...that comment about "work/life balance" sacrificed. There was a great article recently about how one-sided the employee/corporate relationship really is. One side of the relationship has emotions; the other's basically a machine, a mechanism devised by stockholders to increase their investment - when it screws up and has an emotion because one of the parts (your boss) has one, that is corrected ASAP. So it's this relationship between human and machine that *cannot* give anything back, emotionally. On the human side, people have the emotion of pride; virtually everybody is proud of their "work ethic" and most people describe themselves as "giving 100%" or "giving 110%", that extra ten percent coming out of your personal life, the time you owe to family, friends, and yourself. You have emotions where people become attached to "the team" and don't want to "let down the side" and again, make personal sacrifices not compensated for by pay, because it "just feels good" to help out a team member with a sick kid or de-stress your boss at "crunch time". NONE of this spirit of teamwork and sacrifice applies to the other side of the relationship. All those emotional, devoted-to-work, sacrificing employees are sacrificed for in turn when their utility falls below zero. It all represents an ongoing wage theft, in effect: employers routinely profit from the emotional investment, pride, and devotion of employees but don't return it, the way that somebody sacrificing for a primitive tribe would be taken care of in turn by that tribe if they fell sick. Smaller businesses run by owners can react like a normal human group, with a two-way emotional bond. But a modern corporation with absentee owners and professional managers is just a machine that automatically wins these situations because it is never there for the employees that were there for it.
Awesome story. I'd wondered about Postgres and heavy-duty jobs; turns out it's as impressive as touted.
I worked 25 years in an Oracle shop, from Oracle 6.1 to Oracle 12c; assumed everything else, certainly FLOSS stuff, had to be toy products by comparison.
Then I tried PostGIS because I was working with the new free GIS program, QGIS, and PostGIS isn't just a free RDBMS, it's a geodatabase. Soon, I found it was handling gigabytes of map data in an eyeblink - on a laptop. The more reading I did on it, the more of those "enterprise level" features for handling massive data sizes and user numbers I saw. I've wondered why I don't hear more about it.
We had some interaction with EnterpriseDB, who not only sell service, but have their own add-on software that makes shifting to Postgres from Oracle pretty easy for most. I just don't see how we aren't going to hear about more conversions soon.
...which always comes up with 1000 dead for the smallest release of radioactives because they apply a teeny number to billions of people...this news is that the Fukishima incident has almost certainly released enough radiation that somebody will die who would not have done so had Fukishima never melted down. Maybe even two people! Meanwhile, Japan had some 16,000 dead from the other seismic deaths, and over 20,000 died prematurely in the USA last year from the effect of coal-fired power generation on their breathing. Every discussion of nuclear power needs to start and end with the 100,000 people worldwide who die every year for the lack of our replacing coal with nuclear, decades ago. It has cost millions upon millions of lives. And the middle of every discussion should add the question: How come it works so well in France - and with so little opposition, the French being noted for their enthusiasm for street demonstrations?
If you want to destroy the other guy from a position of safety, you were done decades ago: nuke him. Preferably from Orbit, of course, to complete the popular phrase, but in any event we didn't lack for distance weapons of great accuracy. The point of having a close-up battle capability is that sometimes you can't do that. You must have personal presence at the battlefield, to gather information, not hit friendlies, perhaps captive, or because your enemy has in fact surprised you and carried the fight to your doorstep. It would be a poor military that cheerfully assumed it was so superior it always got to pick the distance of engagement, like a thick-walled castle that had zero security if somebody gets inside. Boyd did all kinds of writing about the preferability of hitting your opponent before he gets out of bed or knows you exist; that's always your obvious best battle. (So did Sun Tzu.)
The problem with the F-35 is not that it can or cannot dogfight; it's that it can't dogfight several times as well as earlier aircraft, despite costing several times as much. I'd rather fight $200M worth of F-35's than $200M worth of Boyd's F-16s.
A google led to a claim that Jackthreads starting salary is $100K. And that US Senators make $174K. That doesn't actually sound crazy. I saw an article the other day about garbage workers in NYC making $100K. Was this some result of horrible unionized public-sector runaway overcompensation? No. It was a private company. You have to work at 4AM in any weather. You have to pick up friggin' garbage. People don't want the job. No kid dreams of it. You have to pay $100K these days...in New York where they have high living expenses.
When bankers make $100 million a year, they blithely say it's just the cost of doing business, what you gotta pay to find the right guy, and we made ten billion last year, for which I guess he gets all the credit.
The simple fact that there are many very well run companies (increasingly only in other countries) where the top executives only make a few hundred thousand per year, seems to make no impression on this belief. When Lloyd Blankfein, overseer of then-some-700B in assets for Goldman-Sachs, griped about being forced for one year to make only $10M instead of $100M, his opposite number at the Bank of Canada, with 600B in assets, was Gordon Nixon. Bank of Canada needed no bailouts that year...and Gordon Nixon got a huge bonus for his good stewardship: $10M on top of his regular $1.5M salary. For one year. So if BoC can get good governance for $1.5M a year, why is G/S paying $100M ? Weren't they supposed to be financial geniuses?
I hate the "People vs the Robber Barons" narrative of economic policy; you'd think we could get past 19th-century Labour Movement view of the economy. But guys like Mr. Jackthreads make it hard to break the habit. I'm sure he thinks it's just inherent and "natural" that guys like himself walk away with millions because their ineffable wisdom. It's also completely "unnatural" that anybody else make over $100K per year. When this "unnatural" situation occurs, due to the completely natural process of supply and demand, the "unnaturalness" must be countered by going outside the market to bring in an unbalancing force.
It's impossible not to be reminded of the age of Kings and Princes when one could listen to lectures delivered with a straight face about the Natural Order of Things being the leadership of Natural Leaders designated by divine right over the inherently lowborn people who should know their place.
Bingo. One of the inherent inequalities that is the source of economic inequality between investors and workers, why "R>G".
Capital can move as easily as an "mv" command on a Unix command line; work can only move with tremendous effort and expense. If the two compete for which gets the larger share of the global economic pie, capital vs labour is like the supersonic air force vs hapless duckfoot soldiers slogging through the mud.
Jeez, thanks...but I was just working for (1) a paycheck and (2) because water services protect public health. I worked out that each of us "saves two lives for every year we work"...in the sense that if Calgary had the water problems of rural India, they'd lose 2500 citizens a year to waterborne disease, and the utility has just over 1100 employees. If I could evangelize that career choice here, it's a way more unambiguously "good" a job than almost anything.
The "liberty" of Calgarians to not be stuck up with high water prices from a monopoly, was protected by...Calgarians that voted for the public policy of publicly-owned utilities.
Just to reply to the guy that pointed out that private utilities often work, too, I agree; met many such opposite numbers at conferences. Whether to go public or private is a fair question, but I'd counter that the private utilities must be tightly regulated, including regulated profit. And THEN they tend to provide that slanted information on their costs. Calgary spun off its electrical utility as a "separate" company, owned by the City, but separate from all the dead weight of the HR, Finance,and IT internal departments and a lot of other bureaucratic baggage, so they could compete in the new privatized electrical regime the province invented.
A few years later, we were discovering the top five executives there all made more than the City Manager; like four times as much. Just slipped those raises past the governing board with a bunch of double-talk about "market values" until it hit the papers. Suddenly their salaries plunged...and nobody quit. So much for market values. I'd have to suspect crap like that goes on in every private utility.
Ah, here's how that worked out. After the scandal, the mayor cut them by 20%...and now they've pulled them right back up again. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/......the City Manager still makes $350K, I think. And the new "EnMax" corporation hasn't saved Calgarians a dime on electrical rates. The free market is not automatically a genius. Incidentally, that whole new privatized electricity regime the Province put in 25 years back, was promptly gamed by a little California company called Enron to rob Albertans of billions and it now has some of the highest electrical costs in Canada. Not saying privatization never works, just saying it cost a lot of money on this try.
I also quite agree with the Danish comment that public utilities are dumb about any service provision more complicated than selling one standard thing. Absolutely. I wouldn't have trusted us to market parkas to Eskimos, we were a bunch of engineers. All I'm talking about the municipality owning and renting out are the wires - or fibres, rather - and perhaps also some very basic standard service. For everything beyond basic connectivity, a rich, diverse marketplace of service providers that can all rent access to the same fibres at a standard set of prices would be encouraged.
Sorry you got modded down. Just tossing in the comment that we supported water conservation. We spent money on advertising, and worked over 20 years to force the City to go all-metered, when it had been optional flat-rate in the 80's. Our closest brush with politics, and hoo-boy, were we scruntinized that our reports on the effects of various water-conservation policies were opinion-neutral, no attempts to sway City Council would be tolerated. Imagine a telecom somehow being required to provide neutral facts to a regulatory body! Instead, they play them like violins with hugely slanted information.
If conservation had been a much more important public priority, we could have enforced it without making profits. Just pass a Council regulation that all water rates would be doubled and the new 100% "profit" be handed over to the libraries or something. But new computerized meters could also have charged the same amount as always for your first five gallons per day, and then turned a signal on in your house to let you know you were now paying triple. Again all "profits" to something that saves tax money somewhere else or provides a public service.
Conservation ain't it; there's likely something that private can do better in water (or bandwidth) provision than public, but I don't know what it is, myself.
I just retired from nearly 30 years with my local water/sewer utility. No large business is highly efficient, but this one was pretty good as large businesses go; and there was certainly no money wasted on activities actively harmful to customers. For the first half of my career,I was their IT manager. I could never stop contrasting how the basic water utility worked with how IT providers worked. We painstakingly figured out how much cheaper it was to serve commercial customers that bought water in bulk from residential customers, so that we could work out fair rates for the commercial buyers. Anybody wanting to hook in anywhere could do so for the exact cost of our construction (couldn't even add on a percentage to our costs). Anybody setting up in any registered city lot had to have infrastructure brought to their property line. Everybody got the same rates.
Meanwhile, in IT, anybody who had a networking protocol used it ruthlessly to raise the rates you had to pay to join that network; AppleTalk, Token Ring, DECnet, the works. One thing that "Kids these days" don't appreciate is how one networking protocol that could be provided by many competitors brought down those artificial costs to something like how we work. Every other form of customer control - intellectual property ownership of, say, Windows or control of parts that could repair Apples - was invariably and instantly used by every player to artificially raise costs for the consumer. And we had control of *WATER* - life itself - what could we charge if we could back that up with cops charged with destroying any wells anybody dug or confiscating bottled water? Many dollars per gallon, of course; only the well-off could shower daily. You can see why we had to be a public utility like the roads!
On which topic, what if a monopoly provider controlled the public roads? You'd be paying a buck a block to drive them.
When I read stories like this, I want to tear my hair; they all sound so perfectly pointless, struggles over an imaginary problem. Times have changed. "Information Superhighway" was an instant joke, but the analogy between public roads and the Internet is pretty close in terms of it being "what you must use to go to work, go to market, communicate business". It should all be PUBLIC infrastructure, usable to all at the same rates, provided by that ultimately neutral actor, a government bureaucracy where nobody in it makes one dime more or less when it charges more or less. Employees charged only with accounting costs as closely as possible and charging only those, zero profits, with completely open books and responsible to a democratic body.
Then anybody could rent access including any commercial amount of bandwidth, no lawsuits, no tears.
We should re-wire the continent with all-fiber-to-the-home; and the whole lot of it should be owned by local municipalities and utility districts; their stewardship of it regulated by their States, and that regulation overseen by the Feds. From my career, I trust that system, it seems to work with water. I sure as hell don't trust any commercial arrangement I've seen about telecomm; not one I've seen in my whole life. Private actors can't be trusted to use any control of it honestly.
The assumption of net loss arises from the problem that "arable" land is about more than climate; it's got to be good land. Land that has grown extensive plant life for a long time has a different soil chemistry than taiga and tundra. Just giving it more heat is not going to turn it into a garden. Broadly, destruction is easier than construction. The land becoming too dry to farm is lost; the land that is becoming more farmable will take hundreds or thousands of years for its soil chemistry to change as more plants grow on it gradually. The time of transition will always be a time of loss even if the end-state is more arable land.
Cautious prediction == "nothing to worry about, no reason to even put it in the news".
Un-cautious but still quite possible prediction == "alarmism, ignore".
They'd been making the cautious predictions for 25 years when Gore's presentation caught on. The cautious predictions of the 1980's and 1990's have all been exceeded by this point.
You're thinking "Rising Oceans" are like a bathtub filling up. It's more like a statistical increase in flooding events. Exactly what insurance companies are leery of.
Yikes, sorry, more like $30M/person-day in orbit; there were only 350-ish astronauts total but I forgot some went up many times. Maybe they got it down below $2M per astronaut-working-hour in space, I think my point remains the same.
I don't see that the two kinds of comments are mutually exclusive; indeed, I'm not sure they aren't the same complaint. Without pork barrel spending, there would be NO military-industrial complex. I may be misunderstanding the original complaint, but certainly MINE is that the MIC is almost bewilderingly inefficient. You can get away with that DURING a war, but after WW2, only the propaganda that there was a "cold war" still on made it acceptable to the public...and then they handed THAT insanely inefficient system the job of inventing space travel. Yes, by spending absolute rivers of cash, they got something done, but the inefficiency only increased when they did; it's been steadily increasing since Eisenhower put his finger on it just at the start of the space program and by the end of the 60's, their R&D was so expensive that *without* 5% of the entire national budget, NASA couldn't do anything, couldn't even keep Skylab aloft. They put forward the shuttle as a big money saver and it pretty much took 20,000 people working full time to get ten shuttles up per year (after promising 60). It ended up at $1.5 billion per flight, or $563M per astronaut lifted, nearly $100M per person-day in orbit. And it didn't get cheaper with time over 30 years! Unlike every other human endeavour, they could find no efficiencies. Now private concerns are going into space having researched and built new vehicles on a budget that NASA spends on paperwork. NASA funding is 19 billion a year; even with inflation, that's 75% the budget of the Manhattan Project, 1939-1945. And for that, they can't even get a person into space at the moment. They haven't been able to put a human into orbit since 2011; about 90 billion dollars ago. There is just something fundamentally WRONG with these numbers. Going "Waah, going into space is really hard" doesn't cut it for me. Inventing an air travel industry was also hard and took a lot of engineering. Inventing 300,000 tonne supercargo carriers took some engineering, too. I simply can't believe that the vast majority of funds that the starry-eyed public has invested in the dream of space travel haven't been wasted and siphoned off into profits by a monumentally inefficient bureaucracy.
More like they are 10% not - but 10 cutting words can do more harm than a hundred "Oh don't listen to that jerk" hugs can repair. So it's not that humans aren't good, it's that enough of them are bad to make groups bad unless policed by good people. Twitter has no police. Every large group with no police becomes toxic, either physically or emotionally.
"1%" was always a shorthand for "investor class", high-incomes that come more from investment than work. Really, less than 0.1% qualify, but that looks dumb on a sign.
There are exceptions to every broad statement, but the extent of offshoring in the professions has exerted little downward pressure on salaries, which have generally risen over recent decades. Not true in IT.
Yes, it's possible to chip away at the value of a profession, laws that allow "peers accredited by other countries" to do, say, radiology over the internet from Chennai. But the professional organizations double as unions of a sort. They are dedicated to protecting the public, not their members. (Most frequent question at the professional engineer's association where I live, "What do I get for my dues?" A: "Nothing. We require you to pay them so we can protect the public from bad engineers.")...but in the case of diluting a profession with lower-quality competition, that's the same thing. So, hell yes, you already see the AMA working against having immigrant doctors certified without passing the same difficulty of tests and practice-time. What if there were a "Professional Information Technologists Association of California" (and 49 other states) pressing legislators for laws that required these new-hires to pass a few hard tests and prove their experience before getting certification to take those jobs? There's *NOBODY* pushing for that law now. It takes organization, planning, money. Putting that organization together would be about 10% of the stuff that a real professional organization would do for you.
People are arguing this as if it's a political football and furcrissakes turning it into capitalism-vs-communism.
It's about trade vs profession.
This isn't a serious problem with doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, or teachers. Why? They're real professions, licensed by the local state. This isn't an inherent barrier to foreigners - if they meet the qualifications, it's a fraction of a year's effort and pay to get certified - but it's a huge barrier to the underqualified.
The hirers here are hoping that (a) the new-hires can pick it up well enough that with a few extra staff (and still cheaper) they can keep up production and (b) that the cracks won't show until they're on to their next promotion.
IT needs to be a Real Profession for about six reasons, but as a side-effect, it would end this continual pressure downward on the salaries of everybody in the industry by various efforts to dilute the talent pool with poorly-qualified competitors. Hiring kids away from college is another.
Just about anybody used to be able to hang out a shingle and be a dentist or doctor; engineering was a trade you picked up on the job working under a builder. Anybody want to go back to that? If not, support professionalising IT.
Define "stoners". Most likely, it revolves around a whole lifestyle of consumption. You were also working around a bunch of THC consumers who did not call out such attention.
The French do not subsidize their nuclear, which has been 75% of their electrical production for decades. Their accident and death rates are microscopic compared to any other form of generation. There is pretty much no anti-nuclear movement there, it has no constituency - and the French are hardly shy about demonstrating when they're unhappy about policy.
So if France of the 60's, just 20 years after a devastating war, with 1st-generation nuclear tech and resources, could go mostly-nuclear in a few decades - why is it just inherently impossible for a richer, higher-tech world now to do the same?
Why would they start now? They haven't asked for proof from anybody recently. Make a claim that Iraq has yellowcake, that Ebola is highly contagious, that vaccines cause autism, they'll just print it. Then they go to somebody else entirely for the counter story. If they demanded proof, it would keep people from making inflammatory claims. But their new business model is inflammatory statements, preferably on both sides. A maximum of conflict is to be generated. Far more clicks that just correct information in the first place.
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The one thing I'm NOT reading here is "What's wrong with a W10 upgrade?". For a while there, Microsoft was batting nearly 1000 - Win95, 98 and the NT that was there by 1999 were all improvements on the previous version. Everybody upgraded happily. Then it was like Star Trek movies, with every second one sucking, like ME and 2000.
And now, with 8, 8.1 and 10, MS seems to be on a losing streak. I heard some good things about 10 at first, but they've trailed off in a litany of complaints; the negatives clearly outweigh the few positives.
My employer was one of the ones that hung on to XP a long time - I think we were only fully to Win 7 by two years ago. The notion of another corporate-wide upgrade for 4000 machines is so exhausting that it's not even on the timetable, there's no budget to even start preliminary testing.
If the big corporate buyers that are their mainstay are no longer upgrading, it means new capabilities aren't going to appear. They're going to be outpaced by other options. They've lost the momentum, the initiative.
...that comment about "work/life balance" sacrificed. There was a great article recently about how one-sided the employee/corporate relationship really is. One side of the relationship has emotions; the other's basically a machine, a mechanism devised by stockholders to increase their investment - when it screws up and has an emotion because one of the parts (your boss) has one, that is corrected ASAP. So it's this relationship between human and machine that *cannot* give anything back, emotionally.
On the human side, people have the emotion of pride; virtually everybody is proud of their "work ethic" and most people describe themselves as "giving 100%" or "giving 110%", that extra ten percent coming out of your personal life, the time you owe to family, friends, and yourself. You have emotions where people become attached to "the team" and don't want to "let down the side" and again, make personal sacrifices not compensated for by pay, because it "just feels good" to help out a team member with a sick kid or de-stress your boss at "crunch time".
NONE of this spirit of teamwork and sacrifice applies to the other side of the relationship. All those emotional, devoted-to-work, sacrificing employees are sacrificed for in turn when their utility falls below zero.
It all represents an ongoing wage theft, in effect: employers routinely profit from the emotional investment, pride, and devotion of employees but don't return it, the way that somebody sacrificing for a primitive tribe would be taken care of in turn by that tribe if they fell sick. Smaller businesses run by owners can react like a normal human group, with a two-way emotional bond. But a modern corporation with absentee owners and professional managers is just a machine that automatically wins these situations because it is never there for the employees that were there for it.
Awesome story. I'd wondered about Postgres and heavy-duty jobs; turns out it's as impressive as touted.
I worked 25 years in an Oracle shop, from Oracle 6.1 to Oracle 12c; assumed everything else, certainly FLOSS stuff, had to be toy products by comparison.
Then I tried PostGIS because I was working with the new free GIS program, QGIS, and PostGIS isn't just a free RDBMS, it's a geodatabase. Soon, I found it was handling gigabytes of map data in an eyeblink - on a laptop. The more reading I did on it, the more of those "enterprise level" features for handling massive data sizes and user numbers I saw. I've wondered why I don't hear more about it.
We had some interaction with EnterpriseDB, who not only sell service, but have their own add-on software that makes shifting to Postgres from Oracle pretty easy for most. I just don't see how we aren't going to hear about more conversions soon.
Call me when you can do base-load. All you have to do is be absolutely certain your power delivery will go on 365x24, with no drops.
...which always comes up with 1000 dead for the smallest release of radioactives because they apply a teeny number to billions of people...this news is that the Fukishima incident has almost certainly released enough radiation that somebody will die who would not have done so had Fukishima never melted down.
Maybe even two people!
Meanwhile, Japan had some 16,000 dead from the other seismic deaths, and over 20,000 died prematurely in the USA last year from the effect of coal-fired power generation on their breathing.
Every discussion of nuclear power needs to start and end with the 100,000 people worldwide who die every year for the lack of our replacing coal with nuclear, decades ago. It has cost millions upon millions of lives.
And the middle of every discussion should add the question: How come it works so well in France - and with so little opposition, the French being noted for their enthusiasm for street demonstrations?
If you want to destroy the other guy from a position of safety, you were done decades ago: nuke him. Preferably from Orbit, of course, to complete the popular phrase, but in any event we didn't lack for distance weapons of great accuracy.
The point of having a close-up battle capability is that sometimes you can't do that. You must have personal presence at the battlefield, to gather information, not hit friendlies, perhaps captive, or because your enemy has in fact surprised you and carried the fight to your doorstep. It would be a poor military that cheerfully assumed it was so superior it always got to pick the distance of engagement, like a thick-walled castle that had zero security if somebody gets inside.
Boyd did all kinds of writing about the preferability of hitting your opponent before he gets out of bed or knows you exist; that's always your obvious best battle. (So did Sun Tzu.)
The problem with the F-35 is not that it can or cannot dogfight; it's that it can't dogfight several times as well as earlier aircraft, despite costing several times as much. I'd rather fight $200M worth of F-35's than $200M worth of Boyd's F-16s.
A google led to a claim that Jackthreads starting salary is $100K. And that US Senators make $174K.
That doesn't actually sound crazy. I saw an article the other day about garbage workers in NYC making $100K. Was this some result of horrible unionized public-sector runaway overcompensation? No. It was a private company. You have to work at 4AM in any weather. You have to pick up friggin' garbage. People don't want the job. No kid dreams of it. You have to pay $100K these days...in New York where they have high living expenses.
When bankers make $100 million a year, they blithely say it's just the cost of doing business, what you gotta pay to find the right guy, and we made ten billion last year, for which I guess he gets all the credit.
The simple fact that there are many very well run companies (increasingly only in other countries) where the top executives only make a few hundred thousand per year, seems to make no impression on this belief. When Lloyd Blankfein, overseer of then-some-700B in assets for Goldman-Sachs, griped about being forced for one year to make only $10M instead of $100M, his opposite number at the Bank of Canada, with 600B in assets, was Gordon Nixon. Bank of Canada needed no bailouts that year...and Gordon Nixon got a huge bonus for his good stewardship: $10M on top of his regular $1.5M salary. For one year. So if BoC can get good governance for $1.5M a year, why is G/S paying $100M ? Weren't they supposed to be financial geniuses?
I hate the "People vs the Robber Barons" narrative of economic policy; you'd think we could get past 19th-century Labour Movement view of the economy. But guys like Mr. Jackthreads make it hard to break the habit. I'm sure he thinks it's just inherent and "natural" that guys like himself walk away with millions because their ineffable wisdom. It's also completely "unnatural" that anybody else make over $100K per year. When this "unnatural" situation occurs, due to the completely natural process of supply and demand, the "unnaturalness" must be countered by going outside the market to bring in an unbalancing force.
It's impossible not to be reminded of the age of Kings and Princes when one could listen to lectures delivered with a straight face about the Natural Order of Things being the leadership of Natural Leaders designated by divine right over the inherently lowborn people who should know their place.
Bingo. One of the inherent inequalities that is the source of economic inequality between investors and workers, why "R>G".
Capital can move as easily as an "mv" command on a Unix command line; work can only move with tremendous effort and expense. If the two compete for which gets the larger share of the global economic pie, capital vs labour is like the supersonic air force vs hapless duckfoot soldiers slogging through the mud.
Jeez, thanks...but I was just working for (1) a paycheck and (2) because water services protect public health. I worked out that each of us "saves two lives for every year we work"...in the sense that if Calgary had the water problems of rural India, they'd lose 2500 citizens a year to waterborne disease, and the utility has just over 1100 employees. If I could evangelize that career choice here, it's a way more unambiguously "good" a job than almost anything.
The "liberty" of Calgarians to not be stuck up with high water prices from a monopoly, was protected by...Calgarians that voted for the public policy of publicly-owned utilities.
Just to reply to the guy that pointed out that private utilities often work, too, I agree; met many such opposite numbers at conferences. Whether to go public or private is a fair question, but I'd counter that the private utilities must be tightly regulated, including regulated profit. And THEN they tend to provide that slanted information on their costs. Calgary spun off its electrical utility as a "separate" company, owned by the City, but separate from all the dead weight of the HR, Finance,and IT internal departments and a lot of other bureaucratic baggage, so they could compete in the new privatized electrical regime the province invented.
A few years later, we were discovering the top five executives there all made more than the City Manager; like four times as much. Just slipped those raises past the governing board with a bunch of double-talk about "market values" until it hit the papers. Suddenly their salaries plunged...and nobody quit. So much for market values. I'd have to suspect crap like that goes on in every private utility.
Ah, here's how that worked out. After the scandal, the mayor cut them by 20%...and now they've pulled them right back up again. ...the City Manager still makes $350K, I think. And the new "EnMax" corporation hasn't saved Calgarians a dime on electrical rates. The free market is not automatically a genius. Incidentally, that whole new privatized electricity regime the Province put in 25 years back, was promptly gamed by a little California company called Enron to rob Albertans of billions and it now has some of the highest electrical costs in Canada. Not saying privatization never works, just saying it cost a lot of money on this try.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
I also quite agree with the Danish comment that public utilities are dumb about any service provision more complicated than selling one standard thing. Absolutely. I wouldn't have trusted us to market parkas to Eskimos, we were a bunch of engineers. All I'm talking about the municipality owning and renting out are the wires - or fibres, rather - and perhaps also some very basic standard service. For everything beyond basic connectivity, a rich, diverse marketplace of service providers that can all rent access to the same fibres at a standard set of prices would be encouraged.
Sorry you got modded down. Just tossing in the comment that we supported water conservation. We spent money on advertising, and worked over 20 years to force the City to go all-metered, when it had been optional flat-rate in the 80's. Our closest brush with politics, and hoo-boy, were we scruntinized that our reports on the effects of various water-conservation policies were opinion-neutral, no attempts to sway City Council would be tolerated. Imagine a telecom somehow being required to provide neutral facts to a regulatory body! Instead, they play them like violins with hugely slanted information.
If conservation had been a much more important public priority, we could have enforced it without making profits. Just pass a Council regulation that all water rates would be doubled and the new 100% "profit" be handed over to the libraries or something. But new computerized meters could also have charged the same amount as always for your first five gallons per day, and then turned a signal on in your house to let you know you were now paying triple. Again all "profits" to something that saves tax money somewhere else or provides a public service.
Conservation ain't it; there's likely something that private can do better in water (or bandwidth) provision than public, but I don't know what it is, myself.
I just retired from nearly 30 years with my local water/sewer utility. No large business is highly efficient, but this one was pretty good as large businesses go; and there was certainly no money wasted on activities actively harmful to customers.
For the first half of my career,I was their IT manager. I could never stop contrasting how the basic water utility worked with how IT providers worked. We painstakingly figured out how much cheaper it was to serve commercial customers that bought water in bulk from residential customers, so that we could work out fair rates for the commercial buyers. Anybody wanting to hook in anywhere could do so for the exact cost of our construction (couldn't even add on a percentage to our costs). Anybody setting up in any registered city lot had to have infrastructure brought to their property line. Everybody got the same rates.
Meanwhile, in IT, anybody who had a networking protocol used it ruthlessly to raise the rates you had to pay to join that network; AppleTalk, Token Ring, DECnet, the works. One thing that "Kids these days" don't appreciate is how one networking protocol that could be provided by many competitors brought down those artificial costs to something like how we work.
Every other form of customer control - intellectual property ownership of, say, Windows or control of parts that could repair Apples - was invariably and instantly used by every player to artificially raise costs for the consumer.
And we had control of *WATER* - life itself - what could we charge if we could back that up with cops charged with destroying any wells anybody dug or confiscating bottled water? Many dollars per gallon, of course; only the well-off could shower daily. You can see why we had to be a public utility like the roads!
On which topic, what if a monopoly provider controlled the public roads? You'd be paying a buck a block to drive them.
When I read stories like this, I want to tear my hair; they all sound so perfectly pointless, struggles over an imaginary problem. Times have changed. "Information Superhighway" was an instant joke, but the analogy between public roads and the Internet is pretty close in terms of it being "what you must use to go to work, go to market, communicate business". It should all be PUBLIC infrastructure, usable to all at the same rates, provided by that ultimately neutral actor, a government bureaucracy where nobody in it makes one dime more or less when it charges more or less. Employees charged only with accounting costs as closely as possible and charging only those, zero profits, with completely open books and responsible to a democratic body.
Then anybody could rent access including any commercial amount of bandwidth, no lawsuits, no tears.
We should re-wire the continent with all-fiber-to-the-home; and the whole lot of it should be owned by local municipalities and utility districts; their stewardship of it regulated by their States, and that regulation overseen by the Feds. From my career, I trust that system, it seems to work with water. I sure as hell don't trust any commercial arrangement I've seen about telecomm; not one I've seen in my whole life. Private actors can't be trusted to use any control of it honestly.
The assumption of net loss arises from the problem that "arable" land is about more than climate; it's got to be good land. Land that has grown extensive plant life for a long time has a different soil chemistry than taiga and tundra. Just giving it more heat is not going to turn it into a garden.
Broadly, destruction is easier than construction. The land becoming too dry to farm is lost; the land that is becoming more farmable will take hundreds or thousands of years for its soil chemistry to change as more plants grow on it gradually. The time of transition will always be a time of loss even if the end-state is more arable land.
There's no penetrating you guys' defense shields.
Cautious prediction == "nothing to worry about, no reason to even put it in the news".
Un-cautious but still quite possible prediction == "alarmism, ignore".
They'd been making the cautious predictions for 25 years when Gore's presentation caught on. The cautious predictions of the 1980's and 1990's have all been exceeded by this point.
You're thinking "Rising Oceans" are like a bathtub filling up. It's more like a statistical increase in flooding events. Exactly what insurance companies are leery of.
Yikes, sorry, more like $30M/person-day in orbit; there were only 350-ish astronauts total but I forgot some went up many times. Maybe they got it down below $2M per astronaut-working-hour in space, I think my point remains the same.
I don't see that the two kinds of comments are mutually exclusive; indeed, I'm not sure they aren't the same complaint. Without pork barrel spending, there would be NO military-industrial complex.
I may be misunderstanding the original complaint, but certainly MINE is that the MIC is almost bewilderingly inefficient. You can get away with that DURING a war, but after WW2, only the propaganda that there was a "cold war" still on made it acceptable to the public...and then they handed THAT insanely inefficient system the job of inventing space travel.
Yes, by spending absolute rivers of cash, they got something done, but the inefficiency only increased when they did; it's been steadily increasing since Eisenhower put his finger on it just at the start of the space program and by the end of the 60's, their R&D was so expensive that *without* 5% of the entire national budget, NASA couldn't do anything, couldn't even keep Skylab aloft. They put forward the shuttle as a big money saver and it pretty much took 20,000 people working full time to get ten shuttles up per year (after promising 60). It ended up at $1.5 billion per flight, or $563M per astronaut lifted, nearly $100M per person-day in orbit.
And it didn't get cheaper with time over 30 years! Unlike every other human endeavour, they could find no efficiencies.
Now private concerns are going into space having researched and built new vehicles on a budget that NASA spends on paperwork.
NASA funding is 19 billion a year; even with inflation, that's 75% the budget of the Manhattan Project, 1939-1945. And for that, they can't even get a person into space at the moment. They haven't been able to put a human into orbit since 2011; about 90 billion dollars ago.
There is just something fundamentally WRONG with these numbers. Going "Waah, going into space is really hard" doesn't cut it for me. Inventing an air travel industry was also hard and took a lot of engineering. Inventing 300,000 tonne supercargo carriers took some engineering, too. I simply can't believe that the vast majority of funds that the starry-eyed public has invested in the dream of space travel haven't been wasted and siphoned off into profits by a monumentally inefficient bureaucracy.
More like they are 10% not - but 10 cutting words can do more harm than a hundred "Oh don't listen to that jerk" hugs can repair. So it's not that humans aren't good, it's that enough of them are bad to make groups bad unless policed by good people. Twitter has no police. Every large group with no police becomes toxic, either physically or emotionally.
"1%" was always a shorthand for "investor class", high-incomes that come more from investment than work. Really, less than 0.1% qualify, but that looks dumb on a sign.
There are exceptions to every broad statement, but the extent of offshoring in the professions has exerted little downward pressure on salaries, which have generally risen over recent decades. Not true in IT.
Yes, it's possible to chip away at the value of a profession, laws that allow "peers accredited by other countries" to do, say, radiology over the internet from Chennai.
But the professional organizations double as unions of a sort. They are dedicated to protecting the public, not their members. (Most frequent question at the professional engineer's association where I live, "What do I get for my dues?" A: "Nothing. We require you to pay them so we can protect the public from bad engineers.")...but in the case of diluting a profession with lower-quality competition, that's the same thing.
So, hell yes, you already see the AMA working against having immigrant doctors certified without passing the same difficulty of tests and practice-time.
What if there were a "Professional Information Technologists Association of California" (and 49 other states) pressing legislators for laws that required these new-hires to pass a few hard tests and prove their experience before getting certification to take those jobs?
There's *NOBODY* pushing for that law now. It takes organization, planning, money. Putting that organization together would be about 10% of the stuff that a real professional organization would do for you.
People are arguing this as if it's a political football and furcrissakes turning it into capitalism-vs-communism.
It's about trade vs profession.
This isn't a serious problem with doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, or teachers. Why? They're real professions, licensed by the local state. This isn't an inherent barrier to foreigners - if they meet the qualifications, it's a fraction of a year's effort and pay to get certified - but it's a huge barrier to the underqualified.
The hirers here are hoping that (a) the new-hires can pick it up well enough that with a few extra staff (and still cheaper) they can keep up production and (b) that the cracks won't show until they're on to their next promotion.
IT needs to be a Real Profession for about six reasons, but as a side-effect, it would end this continual pressure downward on the salaries of everybody in the industry by various efforts to dilute the talent pool with poorly-qualified competitors. Hiring kids away from college is another.
Just about anybody used to be able to hang out a shingle and be a dentist or doctor; engineering was a trade you picked up on the job working under a builder. Anybody want to go back to that? If not, support professionalising IT.
...of 135 ISIS agents working within Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple.
Look, it worked for McCarthy. I know it's mean, but we're playing for keeps here.
Define "stoners". Most likely, it revolves around a whole lifestyle of consumption. You were also working around a bunch of THC consumers who did not call out such attention.
The French do not subsidize their nuclear, which has been 75% of their electrical production for decades. Their accident and death rates are microscopic compared to any other form of generation. There is pretty much no anti-nuclear movement there, it has no constituency - and the French are hardly shy about demonstrating when they're unhappy about policy.
So if France of the 60's, just 20 years after a devastating war, with 1st-generation nuclear tech and resources, could go mostly-nuclear in a few decades - why is it just inherently impossible for a richer, higher-tech world now to do the same?
Why would they start now? They haven't asked for proof from anybody recently. Make a claim that Iraq has yellowcake, that Ebola is highly contagious, that vaccines cause autism, they'll just print it.
Then they go to somebody else entirely for the counter story.
If they demanded proof, it would keep people from making inflammatory claims. But their new business model is inflammatory statements, preferably on both sides. A maximum of conflict is to be generated. Far more clicks that just correct information in the first place.