Having lived in Houston, Texas, Im pretty sure its more about maintaining the status quo. After all, the wealthy Texans all go to Rice or Texas A&M. I have never seen an area more blighted by a huge disparity in wealth. There are areas with massive mansions or town-homes, then everything else is shitty apartments.
As a current Houston-dweller of 18 years, I state for the record that your post is bulls***. Mostly what we have here is endless miles of twisty middle-class neighborhoods full of one- and two-story houses. I live in one such neighborhood.
But don't take my word for it. Check the per-capita and income-equality numbers for Houston, and for Texas.
* egregious espionage and mutual ripoffs of billions of R&D investments that then become unrecoverable, or
* constant ongoing patent wars that chew up hundreds of millions in legal costs and require billions of investment into patent warchests
The whole situation has happened before, though. 150 years ago we had a similar war over the patents for sewing machines. It eventually led to the Sewing Machine Combination, which was a patent pool that created a 20-year cartel of four manufacturers. They were the only ones allowed to produce cutting-edge sewing machines.
Notably, the next major innovation in sewing machines (the rotary hook) sat unexploited until the combination expired in 1876 (sources here and here.
I'll add my voice to the chorus of people supporting nuclear power as the only currently viable solution to meet the growing energy needs of the future. It's just madness at this stage to suggest that any other technology can be:
A) As environmentally friendly.
B) As cheap.
C) As reliable.
D) As adaptable (goes anywhere in the world).
Nuclear power is ridiculously reliable, cheap, and environmentally friendly... in principle.
In practice, nuclear power plants are built by large groups of humans who are laboring in the presence of perverse incentives. Therefore, a nuclear power plant built by humans will cost about as much as the nearest competitor (natural gas), will be reliable for the time period that the relevant VPs expect to remain at their current post, and will be environmentally friendly in the sense that uranium mining, refining, and disposal are all hand-waved away.
Don't get me wrong, I am a pro-nuke zealot, and I want nuke plants built no matter what the risk. I am just pointing out that when it comes to this subject, you have forgotten your usual justified level of cynicism about humans.
The value of arbitrage is that the normal trader doesn't have to worry about price difference on both sides of the Atlantic.
This lowers the risk for global trade, and keeps risk premiums down as a result.
Ask yourself the opposite: what is the disadvantage of different prices for the exact same stocks or commodities in Londen or New York ? If you can identify the disadvantages, you'll see the benefit of a trader that works to keep the prices the same.
High-speed arbitrage between New York and London already exists. Our society paid the cost to establish it, and now we benefit from it.
This new cable is increasing the speed of that arbitrage by 65ms. For that increase, we are expending $300m of resources. Is that a good investment, in terms of net social wealth? Will that reduction in latency eventually increase the safety, comfort, and pleasure available to our society? In other words: what is the net social cost of the current delay in arbitrage?
I don't think it's a good investment at all. Some people are making the investment anyway because it is an opportunity to get money even though it does not make money.
All kidding aside, what I think is really going on with this, is it's part of a trend I've been seeing more and more over the last, say, 20 years. People are more and more rejecting technology and technological progress altogether. Not sure why.
I'm a part of that movement. Ubiquitous technology makes me feel vulnerable, because everything is so complex and interdependent now. When the power grid fails, we city-dwellers will quickly be in serious trouble.
I suspect that our poor caveman brains are just finally getting overloaded by the non-stop onslaught of sensory input.
That barrage is probably the reason why every generation of humans is measurably smarter than the previous. Seriously, they have to constantly re-norm the IQ tests because the next generation coming up has lived submerged at the bottom of an ocean of information.
For years, I couldn't go into the electronics section of retailers because the TVs were screeching so loud that I couldn't think straight. Same goes for some of the devices that stores would use to detect those tags, the amount of power used in those cases is substantially higher, but it's really not productive to suggest that because a claim is strange that it must be false.
In the case of televisions, we know that many humans can hear the 16-18KHz scan frequency they emit. And you're not hearing the electron beam itself; you are hearing tiny, electromagnetically-induced vibrations in the oscillator circuitry.
Probably a similar explanation for the RFID scanners. An oscillating circuit can induce physical vibrations at some harmonic of its base frequency, if some component of the device just happens to be resonant at that harmonic.
My point is, your experiences are easier explained as auditory coincidences than as RF sensitivity.
Nope. The patent stands until the USPTO invalidates it. They're motivated to churn through patents and get paid for them... the USPTO isn't necessarily interested in making sure the patents are any good.
Indeed. At more than $1000 filing fee per patent, the USPTO is now a revenue center for the Federal Government. We lack the political will to raise taxes or to lower handouts, so we resort to sneaky, lossy, eventually ruinous methods of revenue. Like patent applications.
So yeah, the incentives at the USPTO are completely perverse.
[Environmentalism is a scam that led to] this small scale rollout and blocking wind farms like T. Boone Pickens.
There is a LOT more to the Pickens story than environmentalist meddling, tax breaks, and ROI. The whole project was a smokescreen, behind which Pickens was attempting to build a water supply business. Do a bit of googling, you'll be amazed at the guy's chutzpah.
"Mozilla [...is...] asking all of the CAs involved in the root program to conduct audits of their PKIs and verify that two-factor authentication and other safeguards are in place to protect against the issuance of rogue certificates."
This may be the first REAL change in the CAs' assessments of the risk versus reward of building and maintaining good layered security systems. Until this week, the idea of a breach leading to delisting and the demise of the organization was an abstract idea. Now it is concrete, which makes all the difference (even though it shouldn't).
Perhaps some mid-level geek will finally, successfully make his case that the issuance process should be airgapped (or other similarly expensive measures).
Unfortunately, we haven't yet seen a change in the economics of issuing a certificate without proper vetting of the requestor. Right now it costs the CA almost nothing to issue a single certificate to somebody who isn't actually who they say they are. And vetting is a real-world activity involving meat and paper, so the MBAs in charge will never put money behind real vetting... until the economics change, anyway.
Weird -- I'm libertarian, yet I have no problem with shorter work weeks. The shorter the better. You know, because I'm all selfish and stuff.
The libertarian issue here is: should there be a law specifying the length of the work week? Or should it be voluntary within companies and industries?
It matters. In Europe they made it a law in order to deal with that one guy at the office who, having no family, spends 80 hours a week at work. Management is too stupid to understand that the 80-hour guy is phutzing around for the first (or last) fifty hours of his week... to management, the guy seems like a motivated superstar, always at the office, always contributing. The Europeans used the law to shut that guy down, saying "We aren't going to compete based on who is willing to live at the office."
Yeah, we've been over this already. Just because I have 8 hours to spend at the office, doesn't mean I have 8 hours of focus to contribute.
I have more like 4 or 5 hours of focus, slightly less if I've had to sit in traffic on the way in. The remaining hours are for my inbox, lunch, surfing, defragging VMs, and so on. No matter how many different spins the "corporate efficiency experts" put on it, I only have 4 or 5 hours of focus per day. They should stop worrying what I do with the remaining time, there's nothing valuable there to be had.
I think the Europeans know this, and so I've come to realize that their 35-hour work week makes sense. I didn't always feel this way. For most of my 20s I railed against it in libertarian rage. Now I see that there is no point in asking humans to sit at the office more than 7 hours a day. It's just a waste of their leisure time, which would be better spent at home.
Scientific community isn't immune to corruption. You need to face that fact, when humans are involved self interest will kick in, and cloud the truth.
In equating self-interest with corruption we will assume you are speaking for yourself.
In any case, grants are money spent to further some aim. Therefore grantors should take a self-interested view. If some aspect of grant applications is found to predict eventual success, grantors should factor that aspect into their decisions. In fact they are immoral not to... and also unethical, if they are making award decisions about money that somebody else put up.
your safety comes second and the governments ability to detect terrorists comes first, is because the death of US citizens is well known to be uncontroversial and tolerable, even on large scales such as katrina.
What is absolutely intolerable is terrorism, because terrorism undermines the governments control of the populous. its one thing if an earthquake kills three thousand people, but its entirely different when a single terrorist accomplishes it...
Not quite. The real death toll from Katrina, for example, is still classified. Were it published, it would significantly undermine public confidence in their government.
The published death toll involved a great deal of 'creative' counting. Oh yeah, lots died from electrocution, and from falling objects, and from heart attacks, and from lawless violence... but those aren't Katrina deaths, you see.
Ultimately there is absolutely no need to fight a cyber war. if the USA was ever attacked, the most effective defence would simply be to pull the plug on all incoming/outgoing IP traffic.
Do you suppose that our enemies have considered that possibility?
Do you suppose they may have agents on the ground over here who could direct the attack?
Do you suppose they already remotely control lots of zombie computers here, who check in to a stateside CnC server for instructions?
next gold rush? nah the land, or at least the mineral rights will be bought by corporate interests who will make a ton of money and you won't see any individuals making it big off the rare metals, unless they happened to own the land and the mineral rights to it.
It is not important who takes the risk, who holds the paper, who makes the money, off this deposit. Handing the title over to John Q. Public will not produce a better or worse outcome than signing it over to Alcoa. They will both seek maximum profit vis-a-vis the market's price.
What is important, is that this deposit is geographically located within our borders. That means that although the price will still follow the market, it will not be practical for the mine's output to be blockaded by Beijing if we got into a shoving match.
Actually climatological modellers, the only people who can really speak authoritatively on the subject have been conflicted for a while. That's actually the best argument against global warming, but most deniers are so mindnumbingly stupid they miss that. Based on what I've read on the subject I am unconvinced of warming; but the risk is sufficiently high that the relatively low costs and side benefits of moving to alternative fuels and capping emissions is worth it.
The cost of capping carbon emissions is 'low' relative to what? You understand that carbon emissions are involved in EVERY act of production and distribution in the world. Just building a system to assess the appropriate fees is a huge expensive undertaking... and the frictional costs (it will surely be like a VAT)... and the fact that when everything is more expensive to make and use, we will make and use less of everything... and the corruption and distortions of giving regulators a new stranglehold on all economic activity... and the fact that alternative fuels are all much more expensive than the traditional choices*. THIS is what you call "relatively low cost"?!
I am not making any statement here about the reality of AGW. We ordinary citizens can't know that, at least not yet... but we already do know what is necessarily involved in a planetwide carbon tax. Your state is just epically wrong, so much so that I think you are practicing deception with an agenda.
*Yes yes I know about oil wars. I also know about wars over the next set of choke points: selenium, lithium, uranium, cadmium, etc.
I don't know, seems reasonable to me. Profit margins can be pretty slim and it does not take much to go from making a cent per user to losing a cent per user and no business is built on losing money.
Groupon, anyone?
Unfortunately people are mistaken about which business is being built under that name. They assume, quite wrongly, that Groupon is building a business uniting groups of consumers with willing retailers via special bulk coupon offers. Groupon's actual business is farming IPO money. Just look at how much effort they've spent on product development.:)
My solution? Maybe society could start paying ordinary people a decent wage again, stop looking down on occupations that really don't require four years of liberal arts education, and give college education to only those who pass stringent entrance exams (regardless of how much or little money their daddy has).
Our society will not permit entrance exams, at least in this era, because we all know which groups score the lowest on exams (on ANY exams). Since we do not currently permit ourselves to address this fact, we must do away with exams. Therefore, college entry must be open to all; those who can't afford it will be subsidized.
Maybe in another generation we'll be ready to face up to reality. Til then we must live in an enormously wasteful society.
"Your smartphone could place you at the scene of a crime, destroy an alibi or maybe even provide one – which is why one of the first things police now do at the scene of a crime is take away a suspect's cellphone.
Well. It will be used to prove you guilty to whatever extent is possible. It will NOT be used to disprove your guilt.
Humans respond to incentives, and police are humans. In our era the police are incented by the fact they are judged by their 'numbers' or 'stats'. So they do what is necessary to maximize those numbers. Other concerns are secondary.
In a future era we will look back on this "management by the numbers" as an expensive way to reduce management headcount. You can easily have 20 direct reports if you are permitted to use an Excel spreadsheet to judge their quality.
And [Manning was] a traitor. Don't forget that part.
I'll go 10 to 1 that you would've been on the side of the British, cheering whenever one of the traitor colonists was caught and trussed up.
Is there space in that head thing of yours for the idea that Our Country may require a course correction? And that those who cause such a correction are not automatically wrong?
Until then, very few moral codes are irrational enough to condemn a fee for services rendered.
And even fewer to condemn educational and charitable works for no fee at all.
I offered no judgment of the Strawberry Tree project, or of the inventor's decision to make it free. I only criticized his statement that it would be 'unethical' to charge a fee.
Sorry to ruin your dopamine rush. I know how delicious it is to jump somebody's case via the internet.
Depends on how you mean that. In the case of SS I expect the money to be invested in ways that get slightly better than inflation, so yes, in pure dollar terms it should be reasonable to get 3 times back what you put in if you contribute over 40 or more years. Adjusted for inflation not so much, but SS is an investment more than a savings account.
Because of the dollar amounts involved, for SS to be an investment requires the federal government to end up owning a significant voting stake in most every major company. That right there should give you pause for thought.
There is no way for SS to be a savings account, because we cannot store 15% of our economic output ANYWHERE... and even if we could, it isn't practical to store that wealth for a period of time, because most of it is perishable and/or trendy and/or services that cannot be stored period.
If you now say "No, we don't have to store the products, we can just save the money", then you don't understand the difference between wealth and money. Wealth cannot be stored on a national level... which means that SS must ultimately be a redistribution system, because retirees are consumers: they each need a daily stream of wealth to consume.
'Energy from the sun is free, and it would be unethical to charge people to use the Strawberry Tree...We are trying to inspire young people to think about the source of the energy they use, and behave and act responsibly,' said the inventor Milos Milisavljevic
If the entire Strawberry Tree installation was free to design, free to build, free to maintain, free to fix after being vandalized, and free of any rents or taxes on the land it stands on . . . then the question of fees would never enter the picture, because Strawberry Trees would already be available everywhere.
Until then, very few moral codes are irrational enough to condemn a fee for services rendered.
Slashdot Mirror
Having lived in Houston, Texas, Im pretty sure its more about maintaining the status quo. After all, the wealthy Texans all go to Rice or Texas A&M. I have never seen an area more blighted by a huge disparity in wealth. There are areas with massive mansions or town-homes, then everything else is shitty apartments.
As a current Houston-dweller of 18 years, I state for the record that your post is bulls***. Mostly what we have here is endless miles of twisty middle-class neighborhoods full of one- and two-story houses. I live in one such neighborhood.
But don't take my word for it. Check the per-capita and income-equality numbers for Houston, and for Texas.
Choose one:
The whole situation has happened before, though. 150 years ago we had a similar war over the patents for sewing machines. It eventually led to the Sewing Machine Combination, which was a patent pool that created a 20-year cartel of four manufacturers. They were the only ones allowed to produce cutting-edge sewing machines.
Notably, the next major innovation in sewing machines (the rotary hook) sat unexploited until the combination expired in 1876 (sources here and here.
It gets worse.
On at least one occasion, OnStar allowed police to secretly listen in to a car's cabin in order to gather evidence for a drug conviction. Start here.
I'll add my voice to the chorus of people supporting nuclear power as the only currently viable solution to meet the growing energy needs of the future. It's just madness at this stage to suggest that any other technology can be:
A) As environmentally friendly. B) As cheap. C) As reliable. D) As adaptable (goes anywhere in the world).
Nuclear power is ridiculously reliable, cheap, and environmentally friendly... in principle.
In practice, nuclear power plants are built by large groups of humans who are laboring in the presence of perverse incentives. Therefore, a nuclear power plant built by humans will cost about as much as the nearest competitor (natural gas), will be reliable for the time period that the relevant VPs expect to remain at their current post, and will be environmentally friendly in the sense that uranium mining, refining, and disposal are all hand-waved away.
Don't get me wrong, I am a pro-nuke zealot, and I want nuke plants built no matter what the risk. I am just pointing out that when it comes to this subject, you have forgotten your usual justified level of cynicism about humans.
The value of arbitrage is that the normal trader doesn't have to worry about price difference on both sides of the Atlantic. This lowers the risk for global trade, and keeps risk premiums down as a result.
Ask yourself the opposite: what is the disadvantage of different prices for the exact same stocks or commodities in Londen or New York ? If you can identify the disadvantages, you'll see the benefit of a trader that works to keep the prices the same.
High-speed arbitrage between New York and London already exists. Our society paid the cost to establish it, and now we benefit from it.
This new cable is increasing the speed of that arbitrage by 65ms. For that increase, we are expending $300m of resources. Is that a good investment, in terms of net social wealth? Will that reduction in latency eventually increase the safety, comfort, and pleasure available to our society? In other words: what is the net social cost of the current delay in arbitrage?
I don't think it's a good investment at all. Some people are making the investment anyway because it is an opportunity to get money even though it does not make money.
I'm a part of that movement. Ubiquitous technology makes me feel vulnerable, because everything is so complex and interdependent now. When the power grid fails, we city-dwellers will quickly be in serious trouble.
That barrage is probably the reason why every generation of humans is measurably smarter than the previous. Seriously, they have to constantly re-norm the IQ tests because the next generation coming up has lived submerged at the bottom of an ocean of information.
In the case of televisions, we know that many humans can hear the 16-18KHz scan frequency they emit. And you're not hearing the electron beam itself; you are hearing tiny, electromagnetically-induced vibrations in the oscillator circuitry.
Probably a similar explanation for the RFID scanners. An oscillating circuit can induce physical vibrations at some harmonic of its base frequency, if some component of the device just happens to be resonant at that harmonic.
My point is, your experiences are easier explained as auditory coincidences than as RF sensitivity.
Indeed. At more than $1000 filing fee per patent, the USPTO is now a revenue center for the Federal Government. We lack the political will to raise taxes or to lower handouts, so we resort to sneaky, lossy, eventually ruinous methods of revenue. Like patent applications.
So yeah, the incentives at the USPTO are completely perverse.
There is a LOT more to the Pickens story than environmentalist meddling, tax breaks, and ROI. The whole project was a smokescreen, behind which Pickens was attempting to build a water supply business. Do a bit of googling, you'll be amazed at the guy's chutzpah.
This may be the first REAL change in the CAs' assessments of the risk versus reward of building and maintaining good layered security systems. Until this week, the idea of a breach leading to delisting and the demise of the organization was an abstract idea. Now it is concrete, which makes all the difference (even though it shouldn't).
Perhaps some mid-level geek will finally, successfully make his case that the issuance process should be airgapped (or other similarly expensive measures).
Unfortunately, we haven't yet seen a change in the economics of issuing a certificate without proper vetting of the requestor. Right now it costs the CA almost nothing to issue a single certificate to somebody who isn't actually who they say they are. And vetting is a real-world activity involving meat and paper, so the MBAs in charge will never put money behind real vetting... until the economics change, anyway.
Weird -- I'm libertarian, yet I have no problem with shorter work weeks. The shorter the better. You know, because I'm all selfish and stuff.
The libertarian issue here is: should there be a law specifying the length of the work week? Or should it be voluntary within companies and industries?
It matters. In Europe they made it a law in order to deal with that one guy at the office who, having no family, spends 80 hours a week at work. Management is too stupid to understand that the 80-hour guy is phutzing around for the first (or last) fifty hours of his week... to management, the guy seems like a motivated superstar, always at the office, always contributing. The Europeans used the law to shut that guy down, saying "We aren't going to compete based on who is willing to live at the office."
Yeah, we've been over this already. Just because I have 8 hours to spend at the office, doesn't mean I have 8 hours of focus to contribute.
I have more like 4 or 5 hours of focus, slightly less if I've had to sit in traffic on the way in. The remaining hours are for my inbox, lunch, surfing, defragging VMs, and so on. No matter how many different spins the "corporate efficiency experts" put on it, I only have 4 or 5 hours of focus per day. They should stop worrying what I do with the remaining time, there's nothing valuable there to be had.
I think the Europeans know this, and so I've come to realize that their 35-hour work week makes sense. I didn't always feel this way. For most of my 20s I railed against it in libertarian rage. Now I see that there is no point in asking humans to sit at the office more than 7 hours a day. It's just a waste of their leisure time, which would be better spent at home.
Scientific community isn't immune to corruption. You need to face that fact, when humans are involved self interest will kick in, and cloud the truth.
In equating self-interest with corruption we will assume you are speaking for yourself.
In any case, grants are money spent to further some aim. Therefore grantors should take a self-interested view. If some aspect of grant applications is found to predict eventual success, grantors should factor that aspect into their decisions. In fact they are immoral not to... and also unethical, if they are making award decisions about money that somebody else put up.
your safety comes second and the governments ability to detect terrorists comes first, is because the death of US citizens is well known to be uncontroversial and tolerable, even on large scales such as katrina.
What is absolutely intolerable is terrorism, because terrorism undermines the governments control of the populous. its one thing if an earthquake kills three thousand people, but its entirely different when a single terrorist accomplishes it...
Not quite. The real death toll from Katrina, for example, is still classified. Were it published, it would significantly undermine public confidence in their government.
The published death toll involved a great deal of 'creative' counting. Oh yeah, lots died from electrocution, and from falling objects, and from heart attacks, and from lawless violence... but those aren't Katrina deaths, you see.
Ultimately there is absolutely no need to fight a cyber war. if the USA was ever attacked, the most effective defence would simply be to pull the plug on all incoming/outgoing IP traffic.
Do you suppose that our enemies have considered that possibility?
Do you suppose they may have agents on the ground over here who could direct the attack?
Do you suppose they already remotely control lots of zombie computers here, who check in to a stateside CnC server for instructions?
next gold rush? nah the land, or at least the mineral rights will be bought by corporate interests who will make a ton of money and you won't see any individuals making it big off the rare metals, unless they happened to own the land and the mineral rights to it.
It is not important who takes the risk, who holds the paper, who makes the money, off this deposit. Handing the title over to John Q. Public will not produce a better or worse outcome than signing it over to Alcoa. They will both seek maximum profit vis-a-vis the market's price.
What is important, is that this deposit is geographically located within our borders. That means that although the price will still follow the market, it will not be practical for the mine's output to be blockaded by Beijing if we got into a shoving match.
Man, the Time to Racism on these China related articles...
Sorry, no, you don't get any virtue points for pointing at a useful cultural observation and shrieking "racism!!!1!".
I realize the other routes to virtue are a lot more work. We apologize for the inconvenience. Perhaps you'd find veganism to be adequately easy.
Actually climatological modellers, the only people who can really speak authoritatively on the subject have been conflicted for a while. That's actually the best argument against global warming, but most deniers are so mindnumbingly stupid they miss that. Based on what I've read on the subject I am unconvinced of warming; but the risk is sufficiently high that the relatively low costs and side benefits of moving to alternative fuels and capping emissions is worth it.
The cost of capping carbon emissions is 'low' relative to what? You understand that carbon emissions are involved in EVERY act of production and distribution in the world. Just building a system to assess the appropriate fees is a huge expensive undertaking... and the frictional costs (it will surely be like a VAT)... and the fact that when everything is more expensive to make and use, we will make and use less of everything... and the corruption and distortions of giving regulators a new stranglehold on all economic activity... and the fact that alternative fuels are all much more expensive than the traditional choices*. THIS is what you call "relatively low cost"?!
I am not making any statement here about the reality of AGW. We ordinary citizens can't know that, at least not yet... but we already do know what is necessarily involved in a planetwide carbon tax. Your state is just epically wrong, so much so that I think you are practicing deception with an agenda.
*Yes yes I know about oil wars. I also know about wars over the next set of choke points: selenium, lithium, uranium, cadmium, etc.
I don't know, seems reasonable to me. Profit margins can be pretty slim and it does not take much to go from making a cent per user to losing a cent per user and no business is built on losing money.
Groupon, anyone?
Unfortunately people are mistaken about which business is being built under that name. They assume, quite wrongly, that Groupon is building a business uniting groups of consumers with willing retailers via special bulk coupon offers. Groupon's actual business is farming IPO money. Just look at how much effort they've spent on product development. :)
My solution? Maybe society could start paying ordinary people a decent wage again, stop looking down on occupations that really don't require four years of liberal arts education, and give college education to only those who pass stringent entrance exams (regardless of how much or little money their daddy has).
Our society will not permit entrance exams, at least in this era, because we all know which groups score the lowest on exams (on ANY exams). Since we do not currently permit ourselves to address this fact, we must do away with exams. Therefore, college entry must be open to all; those who can't afford it will be subsidized.
Maybe in another generation we'll be ready to face up to reality. Til then we must live in an enormously wasteful society.
"Your smartphone could place you at the scene of a crime, destroy an alibi or maybe even provide one – which is why one of the first things police now do at the scene of a crime is take away a suspect's cellphone.
Well. It will be used to prove you guilty to whatever extent is possible. It will NOT be used to disprove your guilt.
Humans respond to incentives, and police are humans. In our era the police are incented by the fact they are judged by their 'numbers' or 'stats'. So they do what is necessary to maximize those numbers. Other concerns are secondary.
In a future era we will look back on this "management by the numbers" as an expensive way to reduce management headcount. You can easily have 20 direct reports if you are permitted to use an Excel spreadsheet to judge their quality.
And [Manning was] a traitor. Don't forget that part.
I'll go 10 to 1 that you would've been on the side of the British, cheering whenever one of the traitor colonists was caught and trussed up.
Is there space in that head thing of yours for the idea that Our Country may require a course correction? And that those who cause such a correction are not automatically wrong?
[...] it would be unethical to charge a fee [...]
Until then, very few moral codes are irrational enough to condemn a fee for services rendered.
And even fewer to condemn educational and charitable works for no fee at all.
I offered no judgment of the Strawberry Tree project, or of the inventor's decision to make it free. I only criticized his statement that it would be 'unethical' to charge a fee.
Sorry to ruin your dopamine rush. I know how delicious it is to jump somebody's case via the internet.
Depends on how you mean that. In the case of SS I expect the money to be invested in ways that get slightly better than inflation, so yes, in pure dollar terms it should be reasonable to get 3 times back what you put in if you contribute over 40 or more years. Adjusted for inflation not so much, but SS is an investment more than a savings account.
Because of the dollar amounts involved, for SS to be an investment requires the federal government to end up owning a significant voting stake in most every major company. That right there should give you pause for thought.
There is no way for SS to be a savings account, because we cannot store 15% of our economic output ANYWHERE... and even if we could, it isn't practical to store that wealth for a period of time, because most of it is perishable and/or trendy and/or services that cannot be stored period.
If you now say "No, we don't have to store the products, we can just save the money", then you don't understand the difference between wealth and money. Wealth cannot be stored on a national level... which means that SS must ultimately be a redistribution system, because retirees are consumers: they each need a daily stream of wealth to consume.
'Energy from the sun is free, and it would be unethical to charge people to use the Strawberry Tree...We are trying to inspire young people to think about the source of the energy they use, and behave and act responsibly,' said the inventor Milos Milisavljevic
If the entire Strawberry Tree installation was free to design, free to build, free to maintain, free to fix after being vandalized, and free of any rents or taxes on the land it stands on . . . then the question of fees would never enter the picture, because Strawberry Trees would already be available everywhere.
Until then, very few moral codes are irrational enough to condemn a fee for services rendered.