China has an extra child exception for all farmers whose firstborn is a girl, so at least 50% of all farmers are going to have 2 kids. They do abort a lot of girls, but I don't know how many.
People living in the city need a residence permit, which is a) hard to get and b) gives away the extra-kid bonus. The extra-kid penalties for city dwellers are stiff and it is more than usual to have only one kid. Two kids are for rich families only and they have cracked down on party members recently. I was there and I have not met a family that had more than exactly one kid. No one aborted a girl, baby girls and boys were almost 50-50 among the people I have met.
And all families mortgage to the hilt to send this one kid to the best (= most expensive) education they can possibly afford. Young professionals that actually finish the hard uni drill earn quite a bit.
Other than that, people are moving all around China in the millions, migrant workers, students, relocations, workers seeking jobs in the economic centers - in my personal opinion the growth is still too recent to come to any conclusions concerning the child-wealth ratio.
What is interesting, though, is the timely coincidence of The Party instating the One Child Policy (1979) and the extreme economic growth that we observed in 1990 until now. It may be a factor, but I wouldn't be sure now.
The situation with the island and no trees is the perfect example FOR capitalism.
Here's a hint:
Why are do we have only a few whales left before they are extinct while there are billions of cattle roaming everywhere from Third to First world?
Any idea?
Because COWS are someone's property.
If I was the proprietor of the forest you described, I would have never allowed all trees to be felled, because I'm not stupid and want my kids to take over the business when I retire.
Most public property is exploited beyond all believable bounds.
Property that belongs to someone is cared for and protected.
If I chopped down the last tree of my own private forest, I will starve soon and that is entirely my own fault.
Get every whale a name tag, an owner and a price. And a GPS-device. Presto: Japan and Norway are now committing theft and cattle rustling and you can sue them or maybe even some Navy will help you.
Make property private or employ the Stasi to protect public property. Your choice. Leaving people alone with public goods leads to extinction of the whales.
We cannot get everyone at the First World Level. Our oil, copper, lithium and tantalum will not suffice for that.
We can get the whole world on the same level though: just send some more foreign aid. Some billions, maybe. It will not help them much, but it will bring everyone down to a level comparable to the 16th century, only with some guns and cellphones, just like err, Afghanistan.
What, if a low birthrate is the CAUSE of a high standard of living, not the EFFECT?
What if the planet would need to be completely ravaged if everyone of the 7 billion people would want the same standard of living like we have now in The West?
That was the reason for my thought experiment on the "limited vaccine scenario": we will never get anyone up to the level they would like, not even the people living in one single city like Washington, Paris or London.
Is it ethical to have children, when you cannot care for them? What does the pope have to do with all that?
Do people in Nigeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Somalia, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Turkey listen to the CHRISTIAN POPE when they have some of the highest population growth rates in the world?
The growth rates are high throughout the region south of the Mediterranean, with no difference among religious affiliation, ergo the Pope is not the reason for people breeding like rabbits despite economic hardships and total and utter overcrowding of the larger cities.
The questions remain:
Shall we expend all resources, funds, efforts towards bringing the rest of the world to the same economical standard?
Can we make sure that the rest of the world will not simply outbreed any of our successes?
Should we reduce funds for any technological progress (Mars, LHC, fusion power) until every last child has access to 2000 calories a day, vaccines against everything and a university-level education?
Can I indulge in Lobster Thermidor as long as a single kid somewhere is hungry?
We need to ask ourselves if we finally want to draw a line if we want global communism.
Money alone will not change anything, no matter if the Pope or Mohammed is the reason behind the no-condom policy. Helping others requires control, rules of behavior, self-disciplined receivers. And I'm not willing to either send truckloads of money OR try to control their way of life. Ours is ours, theirs is theirs.
No resource is truly unlimited, neither air nor oxygen nor hydrogen is. As soon as the resources are seemingly ubiquitous and can be had for free, they are wasted, destroyed, polluted in biblical proportions until they are scarce again.
when clean air is dirt cheap and everywhere, people will not invest a penny in filters for their coal plants (see Kingdom, United, 1850). Air and country become polluted, demand for clean air rises, people get together and make the coal plants internalize the costs of polluting air. Now filters are worth the public image or even mandatory. But clean air is not ubiquitous now.
Clean water: was ubiquitous almost everywhere, so people discharged metric tons of mercury-contaminated slurry into them. Getting some grams of gold was seemingly worth polluting cubic kilometers of cheap, ubiquitous clean water. I think some places in the Klondike area are still contaminated even to this day.
Supply will always create demand. Free resources are wasted en masse for creating even minute amounts of non-free resources.
If all that fails, people will just multiply until they utilize the formerly free resource to its fullest capacity. (see: the Mediterranean, Rome, Greece, 1000BC-1000AD, Trees as the resource with the lowest "unlimited" stock. Greece, especially Crete has almost no trees even today)
Which I had never thought about in the GP post, so I'm glad you mentioned it.
"Random" (if applied to the whole town, of course) has the advantages of being absolutely non-discriminating, impartial, unbiased and therefore "fair" in a very hard sense.
To retain some semblance of order without unduly vaccinating all policemen and hospital nurses, we would produce an additional set of 1000 placebo shots using colored water. We mix 2000 vaccine and 1000 placebo shots very well and then everyone gets one draw and will not know if he got the vaccine or the water until it is too late to riot.
This would work, prevent the "Thunderdome" escalation, conserve the social structure of the town and no one will ever know if he survived the illness through his immune system or the vaccine.
But you cannot predictably save the most influential people in the town: lets call him "Montgomery Burns": if he dies, the town will go bankrupt and be in the dark. If he survives, people will suspect fraud.
Families that followed the "Rabbit"-principle in their family planning will of course be highly favored in the "Random" solution.
So you follow the approach I would call "Communism", which is pretty much the same doctors do in emergencies, when massive numbers of casualties are overwhelming the medical facilities by leaps and bounds:
This is useful in scenarios, where you cannot assess the situation properly or where you want as much people to survive as humanly possible.
I would agree that starting with medical staff and police is a good idea, since both are required for any plan to work. Even in the "Thunderdome" scenario, you need a nurse to apply the vaccine.
("Thunderdome" scenario: no holds barred, free-for-all fight/rule of the strongest, but no one is allowed to leave the town unvaccinated)
But the rest of the "per-capita" communistic approach to vaccination has potential problems that I like to mention, as advocatus diaboli of course:
A) Most children will survive, but not all parents. How are parents selected?
B) One rich, elderly and sick person could be the sole financially competent leader of that business employing more than half of the town's workers. He is despicable scrooge, sick, elderly, but the company that feeds the town pretty much depends on him. Will "Mr. Charles Montgomery Burns" be vaccinated?
C) Is it wise to also save an uneducated, poor, low motivated father (because he has many kids that will be vaccinated) to let an educated, productive, intelligent single man die, just because he has no kids? He could help the rebuilding better than most. Will "Waylon Smithers" (just to stay in the metaphor) be vaccinated?
No, all it takes is a penis and a vagina. The rest is personal choice and/or lack of impulse control.
How do I know?
Religious leaders, especial the one you implicitly mentioned, are preaching their whole life for people to stop killing each other AND not using contraceptives or abortions.
When people follow only the wrong half of the sermon, is it the Pope's fault?
The poor could stop having that many children, now that we have drastically reduced childhood mortality through oodles of foreign aid. But they won't listen, they keep having more and more.
Scarce resources are scarce, and the more people competing for them, the more fierce this will become.
What will the comparatively rich West do with the comparatively poor South that is multiplying rapidly to become even poorer per capita every minute?
What will you do with all those 3.000.000 tons of copper left? Will you distribute them equally, so every person gets several grams of it and people can accumulate more by having even MORE children? Will you increase the price of it, so only the loathed rich Whites can have it? Will you tax it to hell, so the bastardly rich Whites cannot waste it?
This is the ultimate test of character:
You have X billion people, but only YX pieces/grams/barrels of bread/copper/gold/oil.
No matter what you do, it will be too few of that resource to make do for everyone. What allocation mode do you choose? You have to allocate it fair, or people will torch the palace. It will have to be manageable, or your civil servants eat all the benefits of that mode. It will have to be sustainable, or systemic problems will bring the allocation out of balance. It will have to be successful, or competing nations with a different allocation mode will wipe the floor with your crumbled economy.
How will you distribute it then?
Evenly Per Head (=Communism), (no one will have enough of the resource to get anything out of it, people will breed like rabbits to have more allocated to their family, family structures will hollow out that style within 20 years, see China, People's Republic Of until 1980; Germany, Federal Republic of, and Kingdom, United since 1985: Welfare-Queening increased twentyfold, mass immigration transforming the country faster than the World War, half the babies born in welfare-stratum)
Centrally Planned For A Country The Size Of Two Continents (=Socialism), (Your civil servants will allocate the most of it for themselves and their family. Black market and family structures will then supersede central authority, see Union, Soviet)
By Market Price Through Greedy Amoral Stock Exchanges (=Capitalism), (Evil, evil, evil, evil, evil. Will let poor children die, will have people working for MONEY their whole life, bah)
For Your Race Only, Führer Decides Where (=National Socialism), (The Party is of course allocating all the resource to itself, but that doesn't matter since anyone is also a Party Member.. Will breed like rabbits due to the idea of strenghtening the Master Race Gene Pool through "Kinder für den Führer" aka Mutterkreuz. Will balance for a while as they exterminate millions of their minorities, their unwanted but then they have a million soldiers and nothing left to eat. Has then the Hobson's choice of attacking Russia in winter, letting Russia attack in next summer or collapse under their excess male children. The military inventions skyrocket, literally and otherwise, the rest is dark. Until the Russians come, then it becomes darker.)
For Those In Power And Their Most Noble Sons (=Monarchy) (Worked for several centuries and now we know why: the Master/Slave philosophy beats and outsmarts the Tit-For-Tat strategy every time.Will become awkward when millions of people are sent to kill each other after Monarch A insulted Monarch B. Works quite a while, but those living in dirt poor conditions will attract horrible diseases that kill a third of the population including large parts of the Royal Family. Illusion of HighBorneNess is hard to uphold after that, so the rabble drives you out to make a new choice in allocation mode)
Choices, choices, my dear readers.
To make it more succinct and the implications crystal-clear and razor-sharp: you control a small town that has acquired a rapidly fatal disease. The town has 3000 inhabitants but only 2000 vaccine doses in store. There is no
"The Iranian nation, with its unity and God's grace, will punch the arrogance (of Western powers) on the 22nd of Bahman (Feb 11) in a way that will leave them stunned," Khamenei declared Monday.
I have seen these organizations, and I pity anyone who has to work closely with IT there.
Updating the browser is not a big deal, they just need to burst the stasis bubble they like to float in.
Updating now costs only a fraction of updating nine years later. The CEOs just don't see that or are concerned of THIS quarter's earnings only, I don't know.
Updating from IE6 to IE7 on a single machine is hardly a challenge for even a 12-year old. Updating the whole company at once, altogether, from IE6 to IE8 is a multi-million dollar undertaking.
I don't know why corporations like that incredibly tight monoculture among their IT. They work across half the globe, their cafeterias are completely different, their people are completely different, but their IT has to be identical and move in a synchronous fashion, no single laptop shall be different from all other laptops from Europe to Japan.
A centrally-planned economy seems to be a good idea on paper, it looks so rational and so smart to keep synergies and buying-power in large quantities together. But a configuration mistake configuration will then will halt all the clients in the entire company for a day.
Not to mention the complete and utter breakdown of this centrally planned monoculture, if two corporations should decide to merge - which they invariably do, and did, several times over in the nine years IE 6 is deprecated now.
If you stopped upgrading for a whole NINE YEARS, you have nurtured a trivial nuisance into a 500lbs gorilla on steroids.
Sooner or later you will need to upgrade. You can do it soon for chump change found behind the water cooler or you can postpone it for nine years and setup a multi-million dollar project then. Your choice.
Yep, then make the site available for disabled. That is a good cause, morally and legally (and therefore financially) sound.
It will have the side-effect of being usable in Lynx, which is good.
But that doesn't excuse for not dropping support of IE6, since that even takes away resources from properly verifying the site by a truly blind computer user, which is essential for knowing the navigation really works.
Blind users cannot upgrade their eyes, IE6 users can upgrade their browsers, nuff said.
A nice graphic, helpful illustration or professional editing is the features I meant.
Flash-only sites are a pain, I admit.
Usually, the budget and time frame are set rather hard and are less than generous, so implementing IE6 support for layout and all that will take away resources that would otherwise go into honing design, layout and wording.
We could make our website functional for Lynx 0.9b, IE4, even Netscape 1.0 if we wanted, but that is going to eat up resources we desperately need to present the site as professional as possible for the majority of the clients.
The royalties / search costs for a single stock image are around one man-hour. Even if making the site compatible with Lynx would be done in that one man-hour, we would still be one man-hour short in selecting a nice stock image / producing a nice company shot / selecting a nice stock art from Creative Commons image pools.
Investing time and money for diminishing returns is unwise, no matter how large the company and how small the money used. It's still not put to good use.
It is woefully out of touch with reality to - use IE6 on public Internet, ever. No matter how many proxy condoms you wear, you will be infected.
- use a nine year old browser with so many serious flaws for mission critical purposes
- not even think about free, better, safer, faster alternatives.
That your customer has 25000 employees in 30 countries is impressive, but being large is no excuse for lagging NINE YEARS behind the outside world. Being a multi-billion dollar business should yield them enough resources to not stagnate.
When you get too large to move anywhere at all, not even at a snails pace, you starve to death sooner or later. And 25.000 employees is a rather small international corporation, there are much larger ones and they can still move, although changing direction becomes pretty hard.
I bet the 25.000 employee-corp - has put all them in a shared intranet, - put up an MS Exchange or similar groupware across all these departments across the globe - cobbled up an IT landscape of Franksteinian beauty just to have all clients, all servers, all machines in one domain, similar installations and under identical policies. - they have an IT-infrastructure department directly reporting to the CEO himself, which no dependent company can ever override for whatever reason. - they trust the client computer halfway across the globe more than any random notebook on dial-up in Nigeria, because they are considered INSIDE the organization.
Different browsers in one machine don't prey on each other, they can coexist. A Firefox installation does not get an IE6 instance to be "unstable" just by sharing the same hard drive. "Stability" is just an excuse for "we don't want to do anything", which bites back when the technological gap between "yours" and "current outside world" becomes too large.
Deploying updates in a timely fashion is the lifeblood of an IT department. Updating from Vista to Windows 7 is a fluid motion of medium risk. Updating from Windows 2000 to Windows 7 or Linux or whatever becomes a serious and risky undertaking.
No one would use outdated trucks or CNC lathes or or ore smelters or whatever for nine years after they became deprecated just because of "stability".
If "stability" is the reason for a company to stand still, it's time to update the resumes.
Virtual machines are the only solution of course, they cost less money than metal, but still something. But the time required to maintain and test all that legacy stuff is much more expensive.
We had no more testers available that would help us test the site in IE6, so we dropped it entirely and our staff couldn't be happier.
Those that still use IE6 claimed they had not time to test it and some were even slightly offended that we dared to think about discontinuing support for a nine year old ugly and non-standards-compliant browser.
Since IE6 became "old stuff", an entire generation of good dogs was born, living and passed away before our eyes. I think IE6 is worth a lot less of our care and I it's misery will end soon so it can finally go back to The Source.
You're right concerning the 30%-30% calculation: in a decently operating company, 30% more website costs are only a blink in the eye compared to a 30% increase in sales.
Nevertheless, any company has to ask itself, if this is money well spent. Sound companies don't waste money even if they are a small fraction of the expenditures, since that is the primary driver of expenditures slowly eating into the bottom line.
So a redesign of a large corporate website may cost a 100,000 bucks. Getting the new website compatible with IE6 would cost another 2,000 bucks (2 man-days), incurring higher complexity (=higher chance of bugs) and slower rollout (=more testcases).
In a well-managed company, the project manager has to justify that cost, complexity and time increase - and decide if to - postpone the launch date, - skip some other feature or graphic, - save on some other cost factor
Skipping IE6 compatibility would surely not cost much, not overrun the time frame by a noticeable time - but in the real world, IE6 compatibility costs website design and features when comparing and counting dollar for dollar.
Using Windows 2000 because you don't want to give Microsoft another dime is ridiculous unless you're really really strapped for cash.
Since I guess you're not using the same machine you bought 10 years ago, the marginal cost of upgrading the OS along with the hardware is very tiny.
Linux and BSDs are offering more functionality than Windows 2000, with the good feeling of being truly free as in speech. Use Windows XP, Windows 7 or use Linux. Make up your mind, don't stay behind.
Any "regime" that mandates IE6 is crooked, no matter what valid reason they pretend of having.
Free upgrades can be had for half a freaking decade and no matter how large the organization is or whatever large and expensive intranet apps they have that require IE6, mandatory use of IE6 is a strong "organization smell".
A company, organization or regime that uses IE6 on the outside world tells us one of several possible stories:
a) we are too broke to implement a tiny change within 5 years = we will milk you for every cent of rebate
b) we are too slow to get a small change done within 5 years = we will take years to decide for your product, we will never follow any upgrades and instead force you to have support for deprecated products for decades to come.
c) we are uncontrollably huge = dealing with us will be completely unpredictable and random and we will blame you if anything goes wrong because of that
d) we don't care about IT security = your data will probably be hacked, stolen and leaked to the North Korean government. When we are hacked, we will blame your software.
e) We don't want employees to use IE6 on the intranet and Firefox on the outside Internet as a reasonable compromise = We don't make any compromises, expect us to fight for every cent and every clause in the contract.
f) We never had the idea to install IE6 and Firefox in parallel or we don't think our employees can handle two parallel browser = we are stupid as hell. Expect us to demand for several man-years of training at no extra charge. We will also blame your company that your product isn't intuitive enough when (not if) we mess up.
Do you want to deal with a companies sending this sign?
And worse: Do you want your company to send these signs?
How much money would you devote to supporting IE6?
In the real world, money is a hard constraint.
Would you rather drop a nice-to-have feature working on IE8 and Firefox (80% of your visitors) to free up some money for implementing and testing with IE6 (2% of your visitors)?
If you've got a shop or saloon, do you put a water trough in front of the entrance for the few customers riding horses?
They are parasites. Beneficial, symbiotic parasites, but nevertheless they drain your money:
Updates to IE6 can be had for absolutely no charge, have been for half a decade now. IE7 from Microsoft, Firefox from the Mozilla Foundation.
The product upgrade can be had for free, but some companies and users don't want or can not muster the forces, will or funds needed to implement this upgrade. No upgrade in public browser infrastructure for five years is bordering on criminally insane, but just leave it at the cost and effort it takes to upgrade: they are saving on that.
If we are to publish IE6-compatible websites, WE are incurring costs to implement and test the IE6-portion of the website. We need at least two machines sitting around with a working IE6 installation just to verify the site is working for them. With spare parts, support, maintenance and all that. Our websites need more implementation costs, a more detailed test procedure etc. etc. - and all hell breaks loose if the IE6-implementation specialties somehow break the site for current IE8 and Firefox 3.6 users.
In other words, WE are expending money, effort and time so a tiny fraction of potential visitors can save on money, time and effort. I call that a parasitic relationship.
Slashdot Mirror
China has an extra child exception for all farmers whose firstborn is a girl, so at least 50% of all farmers are going to have 2 kids. They do abort a lot of girls, but I don't know how many.
People living in the city need a residence permit, which is a) hard to get and b) gives away the extra-kid bonus. The extra-kid penalties for city dwellers are stiff and it is more than usual to have only one kid. Two kids are for rich families only and they have cracked down on party members recently. I was there and I have not met a family that had more than exactly one kid. No one aborted a girl, baby girls and boys were almost 50-50 among the people I have met.
And all families mortgage to the hilt to send this one kid to the best (= most expensive) education they can possibly afford. Young professionals that actually finish the hard uni drill earn quite a bit.
Other than that, people are moving all around China in the millions, migrant workers, students, relocations, workers seeking jobs in the economic centers - in my personal opinion the growth is still too recent to come to any conclusions concerning the child-wealth ratio.
What is interesting, though, is the timely coincidence of The Party instating the One Child Policy (1979) and the extreme economic growth that we observed in 1990 until now. It may be a factor, but I wouldn't be sure now.
"When you have pollution problems, even really big pollution problems, you still have plenty of air; it's just dirty."
Since my lungs cannot adequately filter out coal dust and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxins_and_dioxin-like_compounds, I would consider clean air to be very scarce in the presence of antiquated machinery.
I can breathe, I will not suffocate, yes. But no, I will not live long doing that. Breathing through a cigarette all the time could be more healthy.
Every time the Pope uses the words "thou shalt not kill", nobody listens.
Don't tell me they suddenly lend their ears when the Pope says "don't use condoms".
And no, people in Somalia, Nigeria, Libya, Egypt etc. don't listen to the Pope - ever.
The situation with the island and no trees is the perfect example FOR capitalism.
Here's a hint:
Why are do we have only a few whales left before they are extinct while there are billions of cattle roaming everywhere from Third to First world?
Any idea?
Because COWS are someone's property.
If I was the proprietor of the forest you described, I would have never allowed all trees to be felled, because I'm not stupid and want my kids to take over the business when I retire.
Most public property is exploited beyond all believable bounds.
Property that belongs to someone is cared for and protected.
If I chopped down the last tree of my own private forest, I will starve soon and that is entirely my own fault.
Get every whale a name tag, an owner and a price. And a GPS-device. Presto: Japan and Norway are now committing theft and cattle rustling and you can sue them or maybe even some Navy will help you.
Make property private or employ the Stasi to protect public property. Your choice. Leaving people alone with public goods leads to extinction of the whales.
We cannot get everyone at the First World Level. Our oil, copper, lithium and tantalum will not suffice for that.
We can get the whole world on the same level though: just send some more foreign aid. Some billions, maybe. It will not help them much, but it will bring everyone down to a level comparable to the 16th century, only with some guns and cellphones, just like err, Afghanistan.
What, if a low birthrate is the CAUSE of a high standard of living, not the EFFECT?
What if the planet would need to be completely ravaged if everyone of the 7 billion people would want the same standard of living like we have now in The West?
That was the reason for my thought experiment on the "limited vaccine scenario": we will never get anyone up to the level they would like, not even the people living in one single city like Washington, Paris or London.
Is it ethical to have children, when you cannot care for them? What does the pope have to do with all that?
Look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-Population-1800-2100.png
Has the pope condemned contraception only since 1940 or what?
Do people in Nigeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Somalia, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Turkey listen to the CHRISTIAN POPE when they have some of the highest population growth rates in the world?
The growth rates are high throughout the region south of the Mediterranean, with no difference among religious affiliation, ergo the Pope is not the reason for people breeding like rabbits despite economic hardships and total and utter overcrowding of the larger cities.
The questions remain:
Shall we expend all resources, funds, efforts towards bringing the rest of the world to the same economical standard?
Can we make sure that the rest of the world will not simply outbreed any of our successes?
Should we reduce funds for any technological progress (Mars, LHC, fusion power) until every last child has access to 2000 calories a day, vaccines against everything and a university-level education?
Can I indulge in Lobster Thermidor as long as a single kid somewhere is hungry?
We need to ask ourselves if we finally want to draw a line if we want global communism.
Money alone will not change anything, no matter if the Pope or Mohammed is the reason behind the no-condom policy. Helping others requires control, rules of behavior, self-disciplined receivers. And I'm not willing to either send truckloads of money OR try to control their way of life. Ours is ours, theirs is theirs.
No resource is truly unlimited, neither air nor oxygen nor hydrogen is. As soon as the resources are seemingly ubiquitous and can be had for free, they are wasted, destroyed, polluted in biblical proportions until they are scarce again.
when clean air is dirt cheap and everywhere, people will not invest a penny in filters for their coal plants (see Kingdom, United, 1850). Air and country become polluted, demand for clean air rises, people get together and make the coal plants internalize the costs of polluting air. Now filters are worth the public image or even mandatory. But clean air is not ubiquitous now.
Clean water: was ubiquitous almost everywhere, so people discharged metric tons of mercury-contaminated slurry into them. Getting some grams of gold was seemingly worth polluting cubic kilometers of cheap, ubiquitous clean water. I think some places in the Klondike area are still contaminated even to this day.
Supply will always create demand. Free resources are wasted en masse for creating even minute amounts of non-free resources.
If all that fails, people will just multiply until they utilize the formerly free resource to its fullest capacity.
(see: the Mediterranean, Rome, Greece, 1000BC-1000AD, Trees as the resource with the lowest "unlimited" stock. Greece, especially Crete has almost no trees even today)
Your post actually contains two possible solutions:
The "Braunau" solution (Hitlers birthplace)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braunau_am_Inn
The "Random" solution.
Which I had never thought about in the GP post, so I'm glad you mentioned it.
"Random" (if applied to the whole town, of course) has the advantages of being absolutely non-discriminating, impartial, unbiased and therefore "fair" in a very hard sense.
To retain some semblance of order without unduly vaccinating all policemen and hospital nurses, we would produce an additional set of 1000 placebo shots using colored water. We mix 2000 vaccine and 1000 placebo shots very well and then everyone gets one draw and will not know if he got the vaccine or the water until it is too late to riot.
This would work, prevent the "Thunderdome" escalation, conserve the social structure of the town and no one will ever know if he survived the illness through his immune system or the vaccine.
But you cannot predictably save the most influential people in the town: lets call him "Montgomery Burns": if he dies, the town will go bankrupt and be in the dark. If he survives, people will suspect fraud.
Families that followed the "Rabbit"-principle in their family planning will of course be highly favored in the "Random" solution.
Is it wise to encourage quantity not quality?
So you follow the approach I would call "Communism", which is pretty much the same doctors do in emergencies, when massive numbers of casualties are overwhelming the medical facilities by leaps and bounds:
- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triage
This is useful in scenarios, where you cannot assess the situation properly or where you want as much people to survive as humanly possible.
I would agree that starting with medical staff and police is a good idea, since both are required for any plan to work. Even in the "Thunderdome" scenario, you need a nurse to apply the vaccine.
("Thunderdome" scenario: no holds barred, free-for-all fight/rule of the strongest, but no one is allowed to leave the town unvaccinated)
But the rest of the "per-capita" communistic approach to vaccination has potential problems that I like to mention, as advocatus diaboli of course:
A) Most children will survive, but not all parents. How are parents selected?
B) One rich, elderly and sick person could be the sole financially competent leader of that business employing more than half of the town's workers. He is despicable scrooge, sick, elderly, but the company that feeds the town pretty much depends on him. Will "Mr. Charles Montgomery Burns" be vaccinated?
C) Is it wise to also save an uneducated, poor, low motivated father (because he has many kids that will be vaccinated) to let an educated, productive, intelligent single man die, just because he has no kids? He could help the rebuilding better than most. Will "Waylon Smithers" (just to stay in the metaphor) be vaccinated?
Choices, choices...
No, all it takes is a penis and a vagina. The rest is personal choice and/or lack of impulse control.
How do I know?
Religious leaders, especial the one you implicitly mentioned, are preaching their whole life for people to stop killing each other AND not using contraceptives or abortions.
When people follow only the wrong half of the sermon, is it the Pope's fault?
The poor could stop having that many children, now that we have drastically reduced childhood mortality through oodles of foreign aid. But they won't listen, they keep having more and more.
Scarce resources are scarce, and the more people competing for them, the more fierce this will become.
What will the comparatively rich West do with the comparatively poor South that is multiplying rapidly to become even poorer per capita every minute?
What will you do with all those 3.000.000 tons of copper left? Will you distribute them equally, so every person gets several grams of it and people can accumulate more by having even MORE children? Will you increase the price of it, so only the loathed rich Whites can have it? Will you tax it to hell, so the bastardly rich Whites cannot waste it?
This is the ultimate test of character:
You have X billion people, but only YX pieces/grams/barrels of bread/copper/gold/oil.
No matter what you do, it will be too few of that resource to make do for everyone. What allocation mode do you choose?
You have to allocate it fair, or people will torch the palace. It will have to be manageable, or your civil servants eat all the benefits of that mode. It will have to be sustainable, or systemic problems will bring the allocation out of balance. It will have to be successful, or competing nations with a different allocation mode will wipe the floor with your crumbled economy.
How will you distribute it then?
Evenly Per Head (=Communism),
(no one will have enough of the resource to get anything out of it, people will breed like rabbits to have more allocated to their family, family structures will hollow out that style within 20 years, see China, People's Republic Of until 1980; Germany, Federal Republic of, and Kingdom, United since 1985: Welfare-Queening increased twentyfold, mass immigration transforming the country faster than the World War, half the babies born in welfare-stratum)
Centrally Planned For A Country The Size Of Two Continents (=Socialism),
(Your civil servants will allocate the most of it for themselves and their family. Black market and family structures will then supersede central authority, see Union, Soviet)
By Market Price Through Greedy Amoral Stock Exchanges (=Capitalism),
(Evil, evil, evil, evil, evil. Will let poor children die, will have people working for MONEY their whole life, bah)
For Your Race Only, Führer Decides Where (=National Socialism),
(The Party is of course allocating all the resource to itself, but that doesn't matter since anyone is also a Party Member.. Will breed like rabbits due to the idea of strenghtening the Master Race Gene Pool through "Kinder für den Führer" aka Mutterkreuz. Will balance for a while as they exterminate millions of their minorities, their unwanted but then they have a million soldiers and nothing left to eat. Has then the Hobson's choice of attacking Russia in winter, letting Russia attack in next summer or collapse under their excess male children. The military inventions skyrocket, literally and otherwise, the rest is dark. Until the Russians come, then it becomes darker.)
For Those In Power And Their Most Noble Sons (=Monarchy)
(Worked for several centuries and now we know why: the Master/Slave philosophy beats and outsmarts the Tit-For-Tat strategy every time.Will become awkward when millions of people are sent to kill each other after Monarch A insulted Monarch B. Works quite a while, but those living in dirt poor conditions will attract horrible diseases that kill a third of the population including large parts of the Royal Family. Illusion of HighBorneNess is hard to uphold after that, so the rabble drives you out to make a new choice in allocation mode)
Choices, choices, my dear readers.
To make it more succinct and the implications crystal-clear and razor-sharp: you control a small town that has acquired a rapidly fatal disease. The town has 3000 inhabitants but only 2000 vaccine doses in store. There is no
"The Iranian nation, with its unity and God's grace, will punch the arrogance (of Western powers) on the 22nd of Bahman (Feb 11) in a way that will leave them stunned," Khamenei declared Monday.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8508813.stm
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=124681
Empty threat or glass parking lot in Tel Aviv? What are they up to?
The Ministry Of Truth has a much more sensitive way to tell this.
"More trust between people and government", and trust begins with knowing who is who and where he lives, right?
I have seen these organizations, and I pity anyone who has to work closely with IT there.
Updating the browser is not a big deal, they just need to burst the stasis bubble they like to float in.
Updating now costs only a fraction of updating nine years later. The CEOs just don't see that or are concerned of THIS quarter's earnings only, I don't know.
Updating from IE6 to IE7 on a single machine is hardly a challenge for even a 12-year old. Updating the whole company at once, altogether, from IE6 to IE8 is a multi-million dollar undertaking.
I don't know why corporations like that incredibly tight monoculture among their IT. They work across half the globe, their cafeterias are completely different, their people are completely different, but their IT has to be identical and move in a synchronous fashion, no single laptop shall be different from all other laptops from Europe to Japan.
A centrally-planned economy seems to be a good idea on paper, it looks so rational and so smart to keep synergies and buying-power in large quantities together. But a configuration mistake configuration will then will halt all the clients in the entire company for a day.
Not to mention the complete and utter breakdown of this centrally planned monoculture, if two corporations should decide to merge - which they invariably do, and did, several times over in the nine years IE 6 is deprecated now.
What for?
If you stopped upgrading for a whole NINE YEARS, you have nurtured a trivial nuisance into a 500lbs gorilla on steroids.
Sooner or later you will need to upgrade. You can do it soon for chump change found behind the water cooler or you can postpone it for nine years and setup a multi-million dollar project then. Your choice.
A stitch in time saves nine.
I know his reasons for abstaining from Microsoft products. I don't share them, but I can honestly understand what he's doing and why.
Keeping a Zombie-class Windows alive is against the Geneva convention and a waste of time.
Testing public sites with it is also useless, since Joe Public doesn't have a Win2K anymore.
Abstain from Windows entirely or keep one recent spare handy. And an iMac as well, since people are increasingly using them.
Keeping an old Win2k serves nothing. It doesn't save costs, it costs nerves.
Yep, then make the site available for disabled. That is a good cause, morally and legally (and therefore financially) sound.
It will have the side-effect of being usable in Lynx, which is good.
But that doesn't excuse for not dropping support of IE6, since that even takes away resources from properly verifying the site by a truly blind computer user, which is essential for knowing the navigation really works.
Blind users cannot upgrade their eyes, IE6 users can upgrade their browsers, nuff said.
You mean, they aren't?
They're just using a "standards-challenged browser", right? :)
A nice graphic, helpful illustration or professional editing is the features I meant.
Flash-only sites are a pain, I admit.
Usually, the budget and time frame are set rather hard and are less than generous, so implementing IE6 support for layout and all that will take away resources that would otherwise go into honing design, layout and wording.
We could make our website functional for Lynx 0.9b, IE4, even Netscape 1.0 if we wanted, but that is going to eat up resources we desperately need to present the site as professional as possible for the majority of the clients.
The royalties / search costs for a single stock image are around one man-hour. Even if making the site compatible with Lynx would be done in that one man-hour, we would still be one man-hour short in selecting a nice stock image / producing a nice company shot / selecting a nice stock art from Creative Commons image pools.
Investing time and money for diminishing returns is unwise, no matter how large the company and how small the money used. It's still not put to good use.
It is woefully out of touch with reality to
- use IE6 on public Internet, ever. No matter how many proxy condoms you wear, you will be infected.
- use a nine year old browser with so many serious flaws for mission critical purposes
- not even think about free, better, safer, faster alternatives.
That your customer has 25000 employees in 30 countries is impressive, but being large is no excuse for lagging NINE YEARS behind the outside world. Being a multi-billion dollar business should yield them enough resources to not stagnate.
When you get too large to move anywhere at all, not even at a snails pace, you starve to death sooner or later. And 25.000 employees is a rather small international corporation, there are much larger ones and they can still move, although changing direction becomes pretty hard.
I bet the 25.000 employee-corp
- has put all them in a shared intranet,
- put up an MS Exchange or similar groupware across all these departments across the globe
- cobbled up an IT landscape of Franksteinian beauty just to have all clients, all servers, all machines in one domain, similar installations and under identical policies.
- they have an IT-infrastructure department directly reporting to the CEO himself, which no dependent company can ever override for whatever reason.
- they trust the client computer halfway across the globe more than any random notebook on dial-up in Nigeria, because they are considered INSIDE the organization.
Different browsers in one machine don't prey on each other, they can coexist. A Firefox installation does not get an IE6 instance to be "unstable" just by sharing the same hard drive. "Stability" is just an excuse for "we don't want to do anything", which bites back when the technological gap between "yours" and "current outside world" becomes too large.
Deploying updates in a timely fashion is the lifeblood of an IT department. Updating from Vista to Windows 7 is a fluid motion of medium risk. Updating from Windows 2000 to Windows 7 or Linux or whatever becomes a serious and risky undertaking.
No one would use outdated trucks or CNC lathes or or ore smelters or whatever for nine years after they became deprecated just because of "stability".
If "stability" is the reason for a company to stand still, it's time to update the resumes.
Virtual machines are the only solution of course, they cost less money than metal, but still something. But the time required to maintain and test all that legacy stuff is much more expensive.
We had no more testers available that would help us test the site in IE6, so we dropped it entirely and our staff couldn't be happier.
Those that still use IE6 claimed they had not time to test it and some were even slightly offended that we dared to think about discontinuing support for a nine year old ugly and non-standards-compliant browser.
Since IE6 became "old stuff", an entire generation of good dogs was born, living and passed away before our eyes. I think IE6 is worth a lot less of our care and I it's misery will end soon so it can finally go back to The Source.
You're right concerning the 30%-30% calculation: in a decently operating company, 30% more website costs are only a blink in the eye compared to a 30% increase in sales.
Nevertheless, any company has to ask itself, if this is money well spent. Sound companies don't waste money even if they are a small fraction of the expenditures, since that is the primary driver of expenditures slowly eating into the bottom line.
So a redesign of a large corporate website may cost a 100,000 bucks. Getting the new website compatible with IE6 would cost another 2,000 bucks (2 man-days), incurring higher complexity (=higher chance of bugs) and slower rollout (=more testcases).
In a well-managed company, the project manager has to justify that cost, complexity and time increase - and decide if to
- postpone the launch date,
- skip some other feature or graphic,
- save on some other cost factor
Skipping IE6 compatibility would surely not cost much, not overrun the time frame by a noticeable time - but in the real world, IE6 compatibility costs website design and features when comparing and counting dollar for dollar.
Using Windows 2000 because you don't want to give Microsoft another dime is ridiculous unless you're really really strapped for cash.
Since I guess you're not using the same machine you bought 10 years ago, the marginal cost of upgrading the OS along with the hardware is very tiny.
Linux and BSDs are offering more functionality than Windows 2000, with the good feeling of being truly free as in speech. Use Windows XP, Windows 7 or use Linux. Make up your mind, don't stay behind.
Any "regime" that mandates IE6 is crooked, no matter what valid reason they pretend of having.
Free upgrades can be had for half a freaking decade and no matter how large the organization is or whatever large and expensive intranet apps they have that require IE6, mandatory use of IE6 is a strong "organization smell".
A company, organization or regime that uses IE6 on the outside world tells us one of several possible stories:
a) we are too broke to implement a tiny change within 5 years = we will milk you for every cent of rebate
b) we are too slow to get a small change done within 5 years = we will take years to decide for your product, we will never follow any upgrades and instead force you to have support for deprecated products for decades to come.
c) we are uncontrollably huge = dealing with us will be completely unpredictable and random and we will blame you if anything goes wrong because of that
d) we don't care about IT security = your data will probably be hacked, stolen and leaked to the North Korean government. When we are hacked, we will blame your software.
e) We don't want employees to use IE6 on the intranet and Firefox on the outside Internet as a reasonable compromise = We don't make any compromises, expect us to fight for every cent and every clause in the contract.
f) We never had the idea to install IE6 and Firefox in parallel or we don't think our employees can handle two parallel browser = we are stupid as hell. Expect us to demand for several man-years of training at no extra charge. We will also blame your company that your product isn't intuitive enough when (not if) we mess up.
Do you want to deal with a companies sending this sign?
And worse:
Do you want your company to send these signs?
How much money would you devote to supporting IE6?
In the real world, money is a hard constraint.
Would you rather drop a nice-to-have feature working on IE8 and Firefox (80% of your visitors) to free up some money for implementing and testing with IE6 (2% of your visitors)?
If you've got a shop or saloon, do you put a water trough in front of the entrance for the few customers riding horses?
They are parasites. Beneficial, symbiotic parasites, but nevertheless they drain your money:
Updates to IE6 can be had for absolutely no charge, have been for half a decade now. IE7 from Microsoft, Firefox from the Mozilla Foundation.
The product upgrade can be had for free, but some companies and users don't want or can not muster the forces, will or funds needed to implement this upgrade. No upgrade in public browser infrastructure for five years is bordering on criminally insane, but just leave it at the cost and effort it takes to upgrade: they are saving on that.
If we are to publish IE6-compatible websites, WE are incurring costs to implement and test the IE6-portion of the website. We need at least two machines sitting around with a working IE6 installation just to verify the site is working for them. With spare parts, support, maintenance and all that. Our websites need more implementation costs, a more detailed test procedure etc. etc. - and all hell breaks loose if the IE6-implementation specialties somehow break the site for current IE8 and Firefox 3.6 users.
In other words, WE are expending money, effort and time so a tiny fraction of potential visitors can save on money, time and effort. I call that a parasitic relationship.