3) Monodevelop isn't the defacto industry standard, Visual Studio is. So no business worth its weight in dog crap is going to consider using it, particularly when it costs a paltry (for business) $800/seat to buy a VS.NET Professional license, versus spending that much on developer time just getting the non-standard Monodevelop app running correctly, much less compiling compatible code they can ship as a professionally-produced product.
My guess is that the GP is still in college and has never set foot inside a corporation of any noteworthy size.
There really aren't any "facts" about me that I'd be afraid or ashamed of getting out in the open.
Given your high level of comfort with such openness, feel free then to post the following information about yourself:
* First, middle, and last names * Street address * Home phone * Cell phone * Work phone * SSN * All credit card numbers, their expiration dates, and CVV codes * The full maiden names of your parents * All email addresses * All username/password logins for each system you log into (you can start with your Slashdot login) * Your ethnicity * Your race * Your religion * How many guns and dogs you own, how your home security system(s) (if any) are designed and configured, and your best estimate of how many policemen are within a mile or two of your home at any given time and the estimated time it would take them to arrive at your home
That should be a good start, because after all: you have nothing to hide. Nobody will use the above information for nefarious purposes - right? (If you believe this, then I would also like to sell you a bridge in Manhattan...)
I have to laugh -- with a touch of cynicism and sadness, but laughing nonetheless -- any time somebody says "I have nothing to hide". I laugh at such naivete. It is always a clear indicator to me that the speaker has not seriously given their privacy much thought (that, or they've had their privacy violated so many times that one more violation actually won't make a difference).
Calling such task-specific speed jolts "productivity gains" seems optimistic unless some measure of overall producivity backs up that claim
Nonsense. Assuming the figures are anywhere near accurate -- or heck, assume simply that a positive improvement in the time it takes for a given task occurs, regardless of the number -- you must take the per-iteration times being quoted and multiply them by the number of times per period they are performed.
A 13.63 second time savings on a single file-move doesn't sound like much. But how often are you moving or copying files? I do it all the time. Let's say I do it 20 times per day -- that's a savings of 272.6 sec/day = 4.5 minutes/day. 4.5 minutes/day saved just on file-moves? That's over 20 minutes/week.
What would you do with an extra 20 minutes/week?
Then there are the other tasks cited. Do your own math.
(Now, personally, those particular numbers seem overly-optimistic. But my quarrel in this post is not with the specific statistics, but rather the analytical mindset surrounding the stats, i.e. the "it's only a few extra seconds, what does it matter?" mindset... Seconds, taken in aggregate, matter. Like the Congressman from the 1980s said, "a nickel here, a nickel there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.")
The improvements, if there are any at all, are productivity improvements by economic definition. They are *useful* improvements if more work can actually be accomplished in the same amount of time. They are *cost-effective* improvements if the extra work performed in that saved time is worth more than the cost of the new monitors; that is, that the cost-benefit analysis comes out in favor of bigger monitors.
TFP needs to be beaten with an analytical stick. Better yet, the editors need to do a better job of filtering out editorials in story links.
What about the module that performs the verifcations (probably just a hash comparison, like Tripwire on *nix)? Suppose somebody conveniently inserts a JMP instruction to the location of the code following a successful verification, allowing the comparison binary to otherwise behave as if the check had succeeded (probably either terminating at that point or trying to perform another verification if a binary hash exists)?
(I personally don't grok x86 ASM well enough to do this. But some people do.)
As with privacy, the question is "who watches the watchers?"
It still runs about 95% of the world's desktops and laptops that are used to access all the "web 2.0" stuff we all love so much and which is currently being hailed as "the end of the operating system"...
So long as web servers, web clients, etc. have the dependency of requiring an OS to run on, OSs will remain relevant -- just as the hardware on which the OS runs remains relevant. Like hardware, OSs just aren't "hot" or "trendy" anymore among us software people, that's all...
Yeah, that totally worked in WWII for Britain, didn't it? Or for the U.S. at Pearl Harbor (which FDR knew about beforehand, but he didn't do anything about it or warn anybody because he needed a way to drag otherwise-isolationist Americans into war with Hitler. How nice that Presidential politics winds up deliberately killing 2,400 of the President's own military; like pawns in a game of chess)?
You mean conservatives have a lock on the English language? And here I thought the English language evolves based on usage...
Oh, that's right: conservatives don't believe in evolution; that the selection of genes is based on a survival-of-the-fittest pattern is really just yet-another one of an unproveable and improbable entity's magical "intelligent designs". Pardon my faux pax!
Nukes are the most useless weapon any country can have, simply because you can't use them. If North Korea nukes the South, the Americans will nuke North Korea; if the Americans nuke North Korea, the North Koreans will nuke the South. So both sides have to rely on their conventional armies, just like before.
This assumes that the leaders who call the shots are sane and rational.
I'm not convinced that Kim Jong-Il is sane and rational. Insofar as Kim is trying to extort money and aid out of the world so his totalitarian socialist empire can continue to function in any way, he may be rational; tightening the screws on richer nations by ratcheting up his threats to the world and to th U.S. in particular every so often is a way to do that.
But he knows he's backed into a corner by the rest of the world, even their ally, China (which is responsible for some 80% of N. Korea's aid donations): will he fight his way out of that corner, or surrender?
As a wise man once said, 'the only thing to fear is fear itself'.
That "wise man" (which he was not, for the most part) was former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR).
I'll thank you not to remind me... I hate Bush as much as anybody I know, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if he starts another war in a wag-the-dog attempt to boost the pseudo-patriotic (read: nationalistic) feelings of my fellow Americans and pull votes to his side on the B.S. grounds that it's somehow "unpatriotic" to vote against the ruling leaders during a time of war...
I'm just not a fan of European smugness regarding their social liberties, that's all. Each continent has its strengths and weaknesses: despite President Bush attempts otherwise, the U.S. still tends to be freer in free-speech rights (as TFA exemplifies (and many FAs like it, mostly from Britain it seems), though Bush's "free-speech zones" around his public appearances are a complete affront to our 1st Amendment), whereas Europe tends to be freer sexually (nude beaches, less anti-gay knee-jerk religiosity, etc.) and in regards to drug use, and Germany where it concerns fast driving on public roadways (granted, that's only on certain long, straight sections of autobahn, but having driven them before, I will say they're unquestionably an improvement over our Interstate system).
Is the human body engineered well enough to take such increased levels of stress though?
I mean, sure, the tibia in your thigh might be *capable* of supporting 3,500+ pounds. But it doesn't do so on a regular basis, even for half-ton beached whales (who are sorry excuses for human beings, every one of them) that sometimes make tabloid headlines (of course, given they're on tabloids, I'm assuming that people like that actually exist...).
Now, over time and with increased regular pressure, human bones will compact somewhat and grow more cells -- this is why martial artists can claim that hitting some object repeatedly will build up their durability and overall "toughness" (though it probably wasn't proveably-known to them until recently).
The same engineering questions apply for your muscles -- including your heart.
Of course, over time, the human body could evolve to deal with these increased stresses -- just as martial artists' bodies do. But as any MA practitioner will tell you, such evolution does not happen overnight; it takes years of careful effort...
But, no, as far as I know, there is no martial law provisions that would allow the feds or a fed dept (FEMA) to overrule anything like that on the state level.
Well, consider some of the Executive Orders. (I make no claims as to the reality of the claims made on that page, e.g. regarding "black helicopter traffic" reportings.) Take 12148 as an example:
Section 1. Transfers or Reassignments
1-1. Transfer or Reassignment of Existing Functions.
1-101. All functions vested in the President that have been delegated or assigned to the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, Department of Defense, are transferred or reassigned to the Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
1-102. All functions vested in the President that have been delegated or assigned to the Federal Disaster Assistance Administration, Department of Housing and Urban Development, are transferred or reassigned to the Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, including any of those functions redelegated or reassigned to the Department of Commerce with respect to assistance to communities in the development of readiness plans for severe weather-related emergencies.
1-103. All functions vested in the President that have been delegated or assigned to the Federal Preparedness Agency, General Services Administration, are transferred or reassigned to the Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
etc. etc. etc.
Another, arguably scarier example, EO 11000 (text can be found here and here):
ASSIGNING EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS FUNCTIONS TO THE SECRETARY OF LABOR
font face="Times New Roman">
SECTION 1. Scope. The Secretary of Labor (hereinafter referred to as the Secretary) shall prepare national emergency plans and develop preparedness programs covering civilian manpower mobilization, more effective utilization of limited manpower resources including specialized personnel, wage and salary stabilization, worker incentives and protection, manpower resources and requirements, skill development and training, research, labor-management relations, and critical occupations. These plans and programs shall be designed to develop a state of readiness in these areas with respect to all conditions of national emergency, including attack upon the United States.
SEC. 2. Functions. The Secretary shall:
(a) Civilian manpower mobilization. Develop plans and issue guidance designed to utilize to the maximum extent civilian manpower resources, such plans and guidance to be developed with the active participation and assistance of the States and local political subdivisions thereof, and of other organizations and agencies concerned with the mobilization of the people of the United States. Such plans shall include, but not necessarily be limited to:
(1) Manpower management. Recruitment, selection and referral, training, employment stabilization (including appeals procedures), proper utilization, and determination of the skill categories critical to meeting the labor requirements of defense and essential civilian activities.
(2) Priorities. Procedures for translating survival and production urgencies into manpower priorities to be used as guides for allocating available workers.
(3) National guidance. Technical guidance to States for the utilization of the nationwide system of public employment offices and other appropriate agencies for screening, recruiting, and referring workers, and for other appropriate activities to meet mobilization and civil defense
Actually, I went to work for a Fortune-listed megacorp in large part *because* I didn't like the management that comes with the instability of small startups like the one I'd worked for previously. Both of the managers/executives at that startup LLC were get-rich-quick-on- types who didn't know anything about IT and didn't care, so long as they could get their angel investors to come through with 6 figures (which, coming in at the tail end of the dotcom craze, they never did). OTOH, one of the two managers I rank better than "mediocre" was the one I started out working beneath at my current company.
These days, I'm wondering if a mid-sized company is where I want to be at, where there might only be 2-3 layers of management above me instead of 5 (7 if you count project management and task-level management within a project). Or, at least, just a *different* Fortune megacorp, if not just a different team within my current company...
You are very right about the work environment vs. the paycheck though. The fact that my job as a salaried developer really *is* generally an approximately 40-45 hour/week job is nice because it's unusual for the field, and I've come to value my free time quite a bit since graduating from university...
Of the dozen or so managers I've had in my short working life (< 10 years), only 2 qualify in my mind as better than "mediocre" - and both of them were much more skilled communicators than anything. None have been both good at communication and good at something else...
Call me a 20-something cynic, but I'm convinced the PHB stereotype really *is* pretty accurate.
The example you give is a pretty good one of an intangible: the effect of item A costing B price on the output C of labor force D, and whether it produces sufficient value E to justify the cost B.
First, deciding whether to include such estimates depend on the level of rigor one desires. Some people are more convinced than others by the social science that goes into making such calculations. Some people see value in what (basically) amounts to a correlative study; others don't.
Second, the most-rigorous way to study the effect of A on C (from above) is to compare the value of D with and without the item A in the system. So, a manager would first take some metrics on his employees' productivity over some period of time, say, 3-6 months. Then he would install item A, and repeat the same measurements. If D is greater with item A than without it, then the question is whether D has resulted in a large enough value of E (i.e. an efficiency gain and/or profit increase) to exceed B. If it has, then A stays in the system; else, it is removed.
"Ah!" you grin, "but A already exists! How is the CBA performed beforehand, so that the purchase needn't be made in order to make a CBA-studied decision about it? After all, the money has already been spent performing the test you describe!"
Right you would be.:-) And AFAIK, there are 3 ways of approaching this, none of them being perfect:
1) Internal study -- Perform the test on a sample in your own organization, and if the test proves successful (A produces value justifying E at cost B), implementing it on a wider-scale. Example: if foosball tables and Nerf guns in the application development department of IT can be demonstrated to produce a justifiably-greater value than before, then foosball tables and Nerf guns would be ordered for the rest of IT, perhaps even for the rest of the company. (Notice how companies don't do this anymore? They probably didn't believe in Nerf guns for developers either.)
The good: It's closest-to-home, and thus most-relevant. The bad: It's more expensive than #2 or #3. The ugly: Your VP's face if you do a big, really expensive study without his approval.
2) External study -- Perform the test on a sample of people in somebody else's organization. Typically, studies like this will show up in trade magazines, online, in university educations, etc.. By building off the experiences of other people, you save piles of money, and the results of the test are replicated far and wide on the basis of that study.
The good: Cheaper than #1, while potentially still being useful and relevant. The bad: If the study is not sufficiently-rigorous, then this effect may replicate bad results to other organizations... (Again, look at Nerf guns in IT in the late 1990s. That was a bad idea replicated throughout Silicon Valley on the basis of other peoples' experience!) Also, what works in one organization may not work in another; thus the question becomes one of relevance: how relevant is organization X to organization Y? At the broadest level, there are lots of differences between government and private-sector jobs, for instance, to say nothing of jobs in different industries - financial services vs. auto manufacturing, food service vs. pornography generation and distribution, etc... The ugly: Employees' faces when they learn that their bosses' decision was based on 10 minutes of reading an article in some trade magazine that said "this is the thing you need to do this year!!"
3) WAGs -- Wild-Ass-Guesses, a.k.a. "assumptions without any real-world basis". e.g. "assume worker loyalty will increase 10% if we give them Nerf guns and let them wear Hawaiian shirts on Friday..."
The good: Costs nothing except time. Can be based on rough estimations of the target population. The bad: Not based on real-world data or facts or anything other than an "unnnh, I guess it's about right.
Not all things lend themselves to Cost/Benefit Analysis.
Disagree. Yes, every decision lends itself to CBA.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of CBA, however. CBA does not always seek a perfectly-accurate answer (particularly where a service cost is involved, such as an hourly rate for somebody's labor on a task of only estimable difficulty), for a perfect knowledge of final costs cannot be known in real-world, non-trivial cost/benefit scenarios.
Instead, CBA seeks a *sufficiently-useful* estimate, and in so doing, notes its assumptions and categorizations. Regarding categorizations, take "hard" vs. "soft" costs, for example: a "hard" savings is a tangible, calculable savings, such as $100,000/year on server hardware purchases. A "soft" savings is intangible (or at least less-tangible), such as "productivity of the workforce increased by 1.55% from having fewer servers to deal with".
The only real question regarding CBA is not whether it is relevant, but what the scope of the analysis should be, and how realistic the assumptions are: after all, if it costs more to do the CBA than each of the possible decisions, then it's a clear case of "analysis paralysis" -- an unnecessarily-complex and expensive analysis.
For example, it doesn't make sense to spend $0.10 in paper and ink costs -- not to mention your much-more expensive time -- to decide whether to buy a $0.05 Tootsie Roll out of a jar at a small family store in Bufu, Montana. There, a quick in-my-mind estimate of whether it'll make me a bit happier or not will more than suffice. But it makes plenty of sense to buy computers for a team of mid-upper 5-figure financial analysts, managers, etc. if they will produce cost-savings/efficiency gains that exceed their own analytical costs.
If you believe my view that you misunderstand the purpose of CBA is in error, then pitch me an example of CBA's irrelevance -- I dare you.:-) (I don't do formal CBA for a living, but in balancing my time at work spent on various tasks, I do it in the back of my mind, and I do formal CBA for any non-trivial personal purchase. And I play armchair economist occasionally, with more formal education behind it than the typical college grad.)
In this case, the benefit isn't $X saved by Congress, or even the country, because there is no way to tell just how much influence this will have. People will have all sorts of opinions once they see the detailed information, and the net result is impossible to predict.
Well, the usefulness of the database/website certainly won't be *easy* to predict. It really depends on:
* The accuracy of the information * The completeness of the information -- What black-ops projects are going unreported? What overpriced toilet seats did the military manage to hide? What bullshit expenses is Pres. Bush hiding under the guise of "national security"?, etc. * The atomicity of the information -- Do we get to see every credit and debit transaction? Or do we merely get to see sums, summaries, etc.? * The ease and extensiveness of access to the information -- Can I get the data as a text file? as HTML? as an Excel sheet? as a PDF?, can I pull a replica of the database from a given point in time, and run my own SQL queries against it?, etc. * The ability to do useful things with the information -- Will the site do regression analyses? Will the site puke out historical data, e.g. can I get all Social Security spending since 1935, and can I get it adjusted for inflation?, etc. etc.
In short, it depends on the *DESIGN* of the project. Hence, this is why CBA is -- if done properly -- done multiple times, at least once for each different stages of the project, using ever-more refined and accurate figures each time.
Personally, I don't consider a project's CBA, timelines, or anything else to be even *close* to realistic until a detailed technical desig
Oh, the board will stay fairly-civil -- at first. But political boards suffer from a decay effect: over time, the conversation decays and devolves into mindless ad-hominem attacks and factless "IMO, this is what we should do" ideological partisan squabbles.
The problem is one of regression towards a mean value of quality. On any given board, as the population rises, the ratio of insightful, intelligent commenters to moronic, idiot blatherers widens. The behavior is very much as if you were traveling leftwards from the right tail on a Gaussian (normal) curve of quality (where quality rises as you go rightwards).
This is because your board will start out being frequented by people closest to you in your social circle: your friends, maybe family, and whoever you make aware of your board online (e.g. people reading your sig, if you put a link there). But over time, word-of-mouth -- viral marketing -- ensures that word of your board will spread from person to person, and like a disease, if the board is considered worthwhile by enough people, you'll see exponential growth, and with it, a rising number of people who don't know you, who have no connection to you, and thus who don't have any incentive to behave the way you would like them to (i.e. civilly and by your definition of "reasonably"). Thus, the amount of crap you will believe yourself to be seeing will rise.
You can try to filter out trolls. But they will always exist. By employing a small group of trusted moderators, you can filter out cynics and anything else you like -- but in so doing, you will run the risk of being called an opponent of free speech (and rightly-so, although, being a privately-run board, you are perfectly within your rights to do so. But I really don't understand why you would want to filter cynicism or anything besides spam or legally-questionable or off-topic material).
I have argued for years online. Even when there are intelligent, worthwhile people to talk to, it is a pointless venture: 99% (and I don't believe this is an exaggeration) of the people, whether participating or lurking, will *not* be convinced by your arguments. You, in turn, are very unlikely to be convinced by somebody else's arguments.
(Personally, I *did* change once due to online debate: from what amounted to basically an Americanized version of a European social democrat to a libertarian/classical liberal that I am now (with only the issues of free speech and gun control remaining constant throughout my various political transformations). And before that, I changed once due to real life debate too, from a somewhat-libertarian Republican to that Euro-like social democrat.)
If you want a classic example of what happens to argumentative quality over time, look no further than Slashdot. All the users with low UIDs (4 digits or less) tend to be very smart, well-reasoned people without a trollish bone in their bodies. The same cannot be said for most of the rest of us in the 6-digit UID range. (Oh sure, the occasional worthwhile poster will appear every so often as more people learn about the board. But they are the exception, not the rule.)
Remember the Pareto Principle (a.k.a. the 80/20 Rule): 80% of your board members (given a sufficiently-large population) will be worthless, while the other 20% make it worthwhile to you and those considering the board...
Good point... He might be able to get a loan from his parents, or maybe the bank. But he does sound like just another kid looking to play games, not make money and/or do something more constructive...
If you're so far out in the sticks that you must resort to satellite instead of Comcast or DSL, then here's my suggestion:
Start a local ISP. Do a little market research on your area; find out what kind of demand there is for fast, low-latency Internet access. If the demand is sufficient to both pay for the service and employ you (and if you're interested), then get a T1, T3, or if possible, fiber run or two to your door. Share it among everybody you can find and run the service yourself.
Then play Quake 4, F.E.A.R., etc. during the down times on your fast line when nobody's calling you for support.:-)
America's economic foundation rests in *competitive* free-markets. So why -- except for obvious political purposes -- would a report like this be destroyed?
Fact: the Bush administration and the cronies they've placed in various 3-letter agencies all hate America.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention:
.NET Professional license, versus spending that much on developer time just getting the non-standard Monodevelop app running correctly, much less compiling compatible code they can ship as a professionally-produced product.
3) Monodevelop isn't the defacto industry standard, Visual Studio is. So no business worth its weight in dog crap is going to consider using it, particularly when it costs a paltry (for business) $800/seat to buy a VS
My guess is that the GP is still in college and has never set foot inside a corporation of any noteworthy size.
Given your high level of comfort with such openness, feel free then to post the following information about yourself:
* First, middle, and last names
* Street address
* Home phone
* Cell phone
* Work phone
* SSN
* All credit card numbers, their expiration dates, and CVV codes
* The full maiden names of your parents
* All email addresses
* All username/password logins for each system you log into (you can start with your Slashdot login)
* Your ethnicity
* Your race
* Your religion
* How many guns and dogs you own, how your home security system(s) (if any) are designed and configured, and your best estimate of how many policemen are within a mile or two of your home at any given time and the estimated time it would take them to arrive at your home
That should be a good start, because after all: you have nothing to hide. Nobody will use the above information for nefarious purposes - right? (If you believe this, then I would also like to sell you a bridge in Manhattan...)
I have to laugh -- with a touch of cynicism and sadness, but laughing nonetheless -- any time somebody says "I have nothing to hide". I laugh at such naivete. It is always a clear indicator to me that the speaker has not seriously given their privacy much thought (that, or they've had their privacy violated so many times that one more violation actually won't make a difference).
Nonsense. Assuming the figures are anywhere near accurate -- or heck, assume simply that a positive improvement in the time it takes for a given task occurs, regardless of the number -- you must take the per-iteration times being quoted and multiply them by the number of times per period they are performed.
A 13.63 second time savings on a single file-move doesn't sound like much. But how often are you moving or copying files? I do it all the time. Let's say I do it 20 times per day -- that's a savings of 272.6 sec/day = 4.5 minutes/day. 4.5 minutes/day saved just on file-moves? That's over 20 minutes/week.
What would you do with an extra 20 minutes/week?
Then there are the other tasks cited. Do your own math.
(Now, personally, those particular numbers seem overly-optimistic. But my quarrel in this post is not with the specific statistics, but rather the analytical mindset surrounding the stats, i.e. the "it's only a few extra seconds, what does it matter?" mindset... Seconds, taken in aggregate, matter. Like the Congressman from the 1980s said, "a nickel here, a nickel there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.")
The improvements, if there are any at all, are productivity improvements by economic definition. They are *useful* improvements if more work can actually be accomplished in the same amount of time. They are *cost-effective* improvements if the extra work performed in that saved time is worth more than the cost of the new monitors; that is, that the cost-benefit analysis comes out in favor of bigger monitors.
TFP needs to be beaten with an analytical stick. Better yet, the editors need to do a better job of filtering out editorials in story links.
What about the module that performs the verifcations (probably just a hash comparison, like Tripwire on *nix)? Suppose somebody conveniently inserts a JMP instruction to the location of the code following a successful verification, allowing the comparison binary to otherwise behave as if the check had succeeded (probably either terminating at that point or trying to perform another verification if a binary hash exists)?
(I personally don't grok x86 ASM well enough to do this. But some people do.)
As with privacy, the question is "who watches the watchers?"
Or, to update an old saying for 21st century corporate America:
"If you can't beat 'em, sue 'em."
It still runs about 95% of the world's desktops and laptops that are used to access all the "web 2.0" stuff we all love so much and which is currently being hailed as "the end of the operating system"...
So long as web servers, web clients, etc. have the dependency of requiring an OS to run on, OSs will remain relevant -- just as the hardware on which the OS runs remains relevant. Like hardware, OSs just aren't "hot" or "trendy" anymore among us software people, that's all...
Yeah, that totally worked in WWII for Britain, didn't it? Or for the U.S. at Pearl Harbor (which FDR knew about beforehand, but he didn't do anything about it or warn anybody because he needed a way to drag otherwise-isolationist Americans into war with Hitler. How nice that Presidential politics winds up deliberately killing 2,400 of the President's own military; like pawns in a game of chess)?
You mean conservatives have a lock on the English language? And here I thought the English language evolves based on usage...
Oh, that's right: conservatives don't believe in evolution; that the selection of genes is based on a survival-of-the-fittest pattern is really just yet-another one of an unproveable and improbable entity's magical "intelligent designs". Pardon my faux pax!
You mean this isn't based on the best movie to ever be put out by the worst Hollywood martial arts "actor" ever seen?
(The best of a well-fought (early on), well-actioned (early on again), horribly-acted (all of them) bunch...)
This assumes that the leaders who call the shots are sane and rational.
I'm not convinced that Kim Jong-Il is sane and rational. Insofar as Kim is trying to extort money and aid out of the world so his totalitarian socialist empire can continue to function in any way, he may be rational; tightening the screws on richer nations by ratcheting up his threats to the world and to th U.S. in particular every so often is a way to do that.
But he knows he's backed into a corner by the rest of the world, even their ally, China (which is responsible for some 80% of N. Korea's aid donations): will he fight his way out of that corner, or surrender?
That "wise man" (which he was not, for the most part) was former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR).
I'll thank you not to remind me... I hate Bush as much as anybody I know, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if he starts another war in a wag-the-dog attempt to boost the pseudo-patriotic (read: nationalistic) feelings of my fellow Americans and pull votes to his side on the B.S. grounds that it's somehow "unpatriotic" to vote against the ruling leaders during a time of war...
I'm just not a fan of European smugness regarding their social liberties, that's all. Each continent has its strengths and weaknesses: despite President Bush attempts otherwise, the U.S. still tends to be freer in free-speech rights (as TFA exemplifies (and many FAs like it, mostly from Britain it seems), though Bush's "free-speech zones" around his public appearances are a complete affront to our 1st Amendment), whereas Europe tends to be freer sexually (nude beaches, less anti-gay knee-jerk religiosity, etc.) and in regards to drug use, and Germany where it concerns fast driving on public roadways (granted, that's only on certain long, straight sections of autobahn, but having driven them before, I will say they're unquestionably an improvement over our Interstate system).
Why must these two points be separate? Is it possible for the search access to both increase sales *and* violate copyright?
After all, that's one of the big questions (if not the biggest) surrounding the RIAA's battles against music file trading...
That damn Dubya! Always taking away the freedoms of Americans that us Europeans enj--
Oh, wait...
Is the human body engineered well enough to take such increased levels of stress though?
I mean, sure, the tibia in your thigh might be *capable* of supporting 3,500+ pounds. But it doesn't do so on a regular basis, even for half-ton beached whales (who are sorry excuses for human beings, every one of them) that sometimes make tabloid headlines (of course, given they're on tabloids, I'm assuming that people like that actually exist...).
Now, over time and with increased regular pressure, human bones will compact somewhat and grow more cells -- this is why martial artists can claim that hitting some object repeatedly will build up their durability and overall "toughness" (though it probably wasn't proveably-known to them until recently).
The same engineering questions apply for your muscles -- including your heart.
Of course, over time, the human body could evolve to deal with these increased stresses -- just as martial artists' bodies do. But as any MA practitioner will tell you, such evolution does not happen overnight; it takes years of careful effort...
Well, consider some of the Executive Orders. (I make no claims as to the reality of the claims made on that page, e.g. regarding "black helicopter traffic" reportings.) Take 12148 as an example:
etc. etc. etc.
Another, arguably scarier example, EO 11000 (text can be found here and here):
Actually, I went to work for a Fortune-listed megacorp in large part *because* I didn't like the management that comes with the instability of small startups like the one I'd worked for previously. Both of the managers/executives at that startup LLC were get-rich-quick-on- types who didn't know anything about IT and didn't care, so long as they could get their angel investors to come through with 6 figures (which, coming in at the tail end of the dotcom craze, they never did). OTOH, one of the two managers I rank better than "mediocre" was the one I started out working beneath at my current company.
These days, I'm wondering if a mid-sized company is where I want to be at, where there might only be 2-3 layers of management above me instead of 5 (7 if you count project management and task-level management within a project). Or, at least, just a *different* Fortune megacorp, if not just a different team within my current company...
You are very right about the work environment vs. the paycheck though. The fact that my job as a salaried developer really *is* generally an approximately 40-45 hour/week job is nice because it's unusual for the field, and I've come to value my free time quite a bit since graduating from university...
Of the dozen or so managers I've had in my short working life (< 10 years), only 2 qualify in my mind as better than "mediocre" - and both of them were much more skilled communicators than anything. None have been both good at communication and good at something else...
Call me a 20-something cynic, but I'm convinced the PHB stereotype really *is* pretty accurate.
So you plan to live "off the grid" as a hobo?
The example you give is a pretty good one of an intangible: the effect of item A costing B price on the output C of labor force D, and whether it produces sufficient value E to justify the cost B.
:-) And AFAIK, there are 3 ways of approaching this, none of them being perfect:
First, deciding whether to include such estimates depend on the level of rigor one desires. Some people are more convinced than others by the social science that goes into making such calculations. Some people see value in what (basically) amounts to a correlative study; others don't.
Second, the most-rigorous way to study the effect of A on C (from above) is to compare the value of D with and without the item A in the system. So, a manager would first take some metrics on his employees' productivity over some period of time, say, 3-6 months. Then he would install item A, and repeat the same measurements. If D is greater with item A than without it, then the question is whether D has resulted in a large enough value of E (i.e. an efficiency gain and/or profit increase) to exceed B. If it has, then A stays in the system; else, it is removed.
"Ah!" you grin, "but A already exists! How is the CBA performed beforehand, so that the purchase needn't be made in order to make a CBA-studied decision about it? After all, the money has already been spent performing the test you describe!"
Right you would be.
1) Internal study -- Perform the test on a sample in your own organization, and if the test proves successful (A produces value justifying E at cost B), implementing it on a wider-scale. Example: if foosball tables and Nerf guns in the application development department of IT can be demonstrated to produce a justifiably-greater value than before, then foosball tables and Nerf guns would be ordered for the rest of IT, perhaps even for the rest of the company. (Notice how companies don't do this anymore? They probably didn't believe in Nerf guns for developers either.)
The good: It's closest-to-home, and thus most-relevant.
The bad: It's more expensive than #2 or #3.
The ugly: Your VP's face if you do a big, really expensive study without his approval.
2) External study -- Perform the test on a sample of people in somebody else's organization. Typically, studies like this will show up in trade magazines, online, in university educations, etc.. By building off the experiences of other people, you save piles of money, and the results of the test are replicated far and wide on the basis of that study.
The good: Cheaper than #1, while potentially still being useful and relevant.
The bad: If the study is not sufficiently-rigorous, then this effect may replicate bad results to other organizations... (Again, look at Nerf guns in IT in the late 1990s. That was a bad idea replicated throughout Silicon Valley on the basis of other peoples' experience!) Also, what works in one organization may not work in another; thus the question becomes one of relevance: how relevant is organization X to organization Y? At the broadest level, there are lots of differences between government and private-sector jobs, for instance, to say nothing of jobs in different industries - financial services vs. auto manufacturing, food service vs. pornography generation and distribution, etc...
The ugly: Employees' faces when they learn that their bosses' decision was based on 10 minutes of reading an article in some trade magazine that said "this is the thing you need to do this year!!"
3) WAGs -- Wild-Ass-Guesses, a.k.a. "assumptions without any real-world basis". e.g. "assume worker loyalty will increase 10% if we give them Nerf guns and let them wear Hawaiian shirts on Friday..."
The good: Costs nothing except time. Can be based on rough estimations of the target population.
The bad: Not based on real-world data or facts or anything other than an "unnnh, I guess it's about right.
Disagree. Yes, every decision lends itself to CBA.
:-) (I don't do formal CBA for a living, but in balancing my time at work spent on various tasks, I do it in the back of my mind, and I do formal CBA for any non-trivial personal purchase. And I play armchair economist occasionally, with more formal education behind it than the typical college grad.)
I think you misunderstand the purpose of CBA, however. CBA does not always seek a perfectly-accurate answer (particularly where a service cost is involved, such as an hourly rate for somebody's labor on a task of only estimable difficulty), for a perfect knowledge of final costs cannot be known in real-world, non-trivial cost/benefit scenarios.
Instead, CBA seeks a *sufficiently-useful* estimate, and in so doing, notes its assumptions and categorizations. Regarding categorizations, take "hard" vs. "soft" costs, for example: a "hard" savings is a tangible, calculable savings, such as $100,000/year on server hardware purchases. A "soft" savings is intangible (or at least less-tangible), such as "productivity of the workforce increased by 1.55% from having fewer servers to deal with".
The only real question regarding CBA is not whether it is relevant, but what the scope of the analysis should be, and how realistic the assumptions are: after all, if it costs more to do the CBA than each of the possible decisions, then it's a clear case of "analysis paralysis" -- an unnecessarily-complex and expensive analysis.
For example, it doesn't make sense to spend $0.10 in paper and ink costs -- not to mention your much-more expensive time -- to decide whether to buy a $0.05 Tootsie Roll out of a jar at a small family store in Bufu, Montana. There, a quick in-my-mind estimate of whether it'll make me a bit happier or not will more than suffice. But it makes plenty of sense to buy computers for a team of mid-upper 5-figure financial analysts, managers, etc. if they will produce cost-savings/efficiency gains that exceed their own analytical costs.
If you believe my view that you misunderstand the purpose of CBA is in error, then pitch me an example of CBA's irrelevance -- I dare you.
Well, the usefulness of the database/website certainly won't be *easy* to predict. It really depends on:
* The accuracy of the information
* The completeness of the information -- What black-ops projects are going unreported? What overpriced toilet seats did the military manage to hide? What bullshit expenses is Pres. Bush hiding under the guise of "national security"?, etc.
* The atomicity of the information -- Do we get to see every credit and debit transaction? Or do we merely get to see sums, summaries, etc.?
* The ease and extensiveness of access to the information -- Can I get the data as a text file? as HTML? as an Excel sheet? as a PDF?, can I pull a replica of the database from a given point in time, and run my own SQL queries against it?, etc.
* The ability to do useful things with the information -- Will the site do regression analyses? Will the site puke out historical data, e.g. can I get all Social Security spending since 1935, and can I get it adjusted for inflation?, etc. etc.
In short, it depends on the *DESIGN* of the project. Hence, this is why CBA is -- if done properly -- done multiple times, at least once for each different stages of the project, using ever-more refined and accurate figures each time.
Personally, I don't consider a project's CBA, timelines, or anything else to be even *close* to realistic until a detailed technical desig
I will say this is impossible.
Oh, the board will stay fairly-civil -- at first. But political boards suffer from a decay effect: over time, the conversation decays and devolves into mindless ad-hominem attacks and factless "IMO, this is what we should do" ideological partisan squabbles.
The problem is one of regression towards a mean value of quality. On any given board, as the population rises, the ratio of insightful, intelligent commenters to moronic, idiot blatherers widens. The behavior is very much as if you were traveling leftwards from the right tail on a Gaussian (normal) curve of quality (where quality rises as you go rightwards).
This is because your board will start out being frequented by people closest to you in your social circle: your friends, maybe family, and whoever you make aware of your board online (e.g. people reading your sig, if you put a link there). But over time, word-of-mouth -- viral marketing -- ensures that word of your board will spread from person to person, and like a disease, if the board is considered worthwhile by enough people, you'll see exponential growth, and with it, a rising number of people who don't know you, who have no connection to you, and thus who don't have any incentive to behave the way you would like them to (i.e. civilly and by your definition of "reasonably"). Thus, the amount of crap you will believe yourself to be seeing will rise.
You can try to filter out trolls. But they will always exist. By employing a small group of trusted moderators, you can filter out cynics and anything else you like -- but in so doing, you will run the risk of being called an opponent of free speech (and rightly-so, although, being a privately-run board, you are perfectly within your rights to do so. But I really don't understand why you would want to filter cynicism or anything besides spam or legally-questionable or off-topic material).
I have argued for years online. Even when there are intelligent, worthwhile people to talk to, it is a pointless venture: 99% (and I don't believe this is an exaggeration) of the people, whether participating or lurking, will *not* be convinced by your arguments. You, in turn, are very unlikely to be convinced by somebody else's arguments.
(Personally, I *did* change once due to online debate: from what amounted to basically an Americanized version of a European social democrat to a libertarian/classical liberal that I am now (with only the issues of free speech and gun control remaining constant throughout my various political transformations). And before that, I changed once due to real life debate too, from a somewhat-libertarian Republican to that Euro-like social democrat.)
If you want a classic example of what happens to argumentative quality over time, look no further than Slashdot. All the users with low UIDs (4 digits or less) tend to be very smart, well-reasoned people without a trollish bone in their bodies. The same cannot be said for most of the rest of us in the 6-digit UID range. (Oh sure, the occasional worthwhile poster will appear every so often as more people learn about the board. But they are the exception, not the rule.)
Remember the Pareto Principle (a.k.a. the 80/20 Rule): 80% of your board members (given a sufficiently-large population) will be worthless, while the other 20% make it worthwhile to you and those considering the board...
Good point... He might be able to get a loan from his parents, or maybe the bank. But he does sound like just another kid looking to play games, not make money and/or do something more constructive...
If you're so far out in the sticks that you must resort to satellite instead of Comcast or DSL, then here's my suggestion:
:-)
Start a local ISP. Do a little market research on your area; find out what kind of demand there is for fast, low-latency Internet access. If the demand is sufficient to both pay for the service and employ you (and if you're interested), then get a T1, T3, or if possible, fiber run or two to your door. Share it among everybody you can find and run the service yourself.
Then play Quake 4, F.E.A.R., etc. during the down times on your fast line when nobody's calling you for support.
Why Johnny Can't Keep Track of His Stories!
America's economic foundation rests in *competitive* free-markets. So why -- except for obvious political purposes -- would a report like this be destroyed?
Fact: the Bush administration and the cronies they've placed in various 3-letter agencies all hate America.