My experience has often been:
First time I have to do something I do it.
Second time I think of how to automate it and wish I'd done that the first time.
Third time...
I'm not sure whether it's better to "automate" the first time or to wait to see if the task re-occurs.
Sir John Harington: A witty and erudite figure at the court of Elizabeth I, John Harington is now remembered mainly for two things. One is his cynical epigram on treason: ‘Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.’ The other is his invention of the flush water closet.... His flush toilet did not catch on and serious improvement of lavatories in England had to wait for the 18th century and the coming of the S-bend.
(I'd actually prepared this one earlier - I'd intended to post the epigram as a reply to an earlier post - I knew the epigram but had to look up who'd said it.)
"No: not always the case, but I have seen this pattern many times."
To put this into context for the rest of us, roughly: what proportion of allegation of domestic violence weere false, what proportion were true?
'If civil suits required a unanimous jury verdict... and... an evidence standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt"... the junk suits would melt away'
-- Correct, as would a very large number of non-junk suits, which is not such a good idea.
Ted Cruz didn't got booed off the stage of the Republican convention because the audience disliked his politics: it was because - for the reasons Cruz gave - he wasn't going to endorse Trump as the Republican candidate. I'll grant you that if there was a popularity contest in the Senate, Cruz would probably be in the 101st position.
Disclaimer: that's the first - and probably the last - time I've defended Ted Cruz. If I lived in the US and my only choice was to vote for Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, I'd probably go to the nearest desert and stick my head in the sand. As it happens, I live in the UK, and we have our own problems with political clowns and demagogues. It's interesting that Donald Trump's former campaign manager had such a low opinion of Trump's supporters that he thought they'd have problems understanding words like "demagogue" and "denominator". And that he has sufficent science expertise to be able to call Stephen Hawking a "so-called genius".
"Your sort of right but wrong. Profit is not the problem with expensive health care."
To get one thing out of the way first: I'm in the UK, and I don't think there is anything wrong with profit in providing healthcare, provided the companies/people making the profit are operating in a reasonably free market. That said, I do like a system which provides universal healthcare. (So to parts of the Republican Party I probably seem like a pinko cheese-eating surrender monkey commie.)
"The problem is government involvement and patents."
To quote an AC replying (I think) to another post:
"The thing with healthcare is that some level of care gets provided whether the patient can pay or not. So that raises costs overall.."
--So why then is healthcare in the US three times the cost per head in the UK which has universal health care free at the point of use?
So, what that AC already said (subject to the caveat below), plus this graphic from the Kings Fund, a well-respected UK organisation researching healthcare, and a question:
Do you have any evidence that the US is getting value for money by apparently spending about 45% per more of per capita GDP on healthcare than, for example, Germany, which has a similar per capita GDP to that of the US.?
Caveat: gdp per capita: UK about 42,000usd, USA about 53,000usd, about 1.25 times the UK;
healthcare spend as a percentage of GDP: UK about 8.7%, USA about 16.3%, about 1.9 times the UK;
so the US cost per head is about 2.4 times that for the UK.
"There is lots of food just growing out in parks, along trails, and in small streams and creeks. There are people who choose to be homeless and free."
That was a practical option when most people were employed in farming (or, indeed, in hunter-gathering), and you could find some spare land not owned by anyone else. (Or at any rate not owned by anyone you couldn't cheat out of their land.) As you observe there are still some people in modern economies who can live that way. But I suggest that in, for example, the UK or the USA that life style can only sustain relatively few people, and that if large numbers of people tried it now there would be widescale failure of resources and/or fighting over scarce resources.
See the posts above by
ultranova
and Christopher C.
"Most successful people have failed many times before hitting a success." - Avoiding debts by using limited liability or by you or your company declaring bankruptcy is a type of welfare. It may well be that limited liability is necessary to encourage entrepreneurs and limit the consequences of failure, but don't take full advantage of it and then ask the government - and the rest of us who haven't run away from debts - to leave you alone.
"Anything divided by infinite equals 0" -- Large correction: not necessarily. For example, using a non-standard model of the rational (or real) numbers:
(a) any positive finite non-zero number divided by a positive infinite number is a positive infinitesimal number, that is a number greater than 0 but smaller than any positive "standard" number;
(b) if n is a positive infinite number and N is a greater infinite number then N/n is greater than or equal to some finite positive standard number, and might be infinite.
Non-standard analysis Surreal number - Slashot connection - Donald Knuth invented the name "Surreal number" (one construction of surreal numbers was invented by the mathematician John Horton Conway)
the "useful theater" we do today - reinforcing that, an extract from Beyond the Fringe, The Aftermyth of War
Commander (Peter Cook): Perkins - The war's not going very well. War's a psychological thing, Perkins, rather like a game of football. You know how in a game of football ten men often play better than eleven. Perkins, we're asking you to be that one man. Perkins, I want you to lay down your life. We need a futile gesture at this stage. It'll raise the whole tone of the war. Get up in a crate [RAF slang for an aircraft] Perkins, pop over to Bremen, take a shufti [slang for a look], don't come back. Goodbye Perkins. God I wish I was going too.
Perkins (Jonathan Miller): Goodbye sir - or is it au revoir?
Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel 1969-1974
Before that was Mrs Bandaranaike, Prime Minister of Sri Lanka from 1960 to 2000, with two interruptions. But she was the widow of a former Prime Minister. For example, the recent election of Tsai Ing-wen as President of Taiwan is the first time a woman has led an East Asian country without also being the wife or daughter of a former leader of that country.
Congratulations (genuine) on mentioning and linking to crystal radio sets. Many many years ago for a short time I used a crystal radio set my grandfather had used in the 1930s! Or maybe I tried to use it and couldn't get it to work. But, anyway, thanks for the nostalgia!
"If you want a public health system, move to Canada or the UK. We had the best system in the world, the best doctors, the best hospitals. A competitive system is far superior to a government run bureaucratic mess."
health-care-spending-compared
Do you think that by spending about 40% per capita more on health care than any other country in the world the USA has health care which is on average significantly better than the health care in, for example, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Canada, let alone 40% better?
A true story: many years ago I visited an English friend who at the time was working in Vienna. In a conversation with her Canadian husband, for some reason (I forget the context) I praised the UK National Health Service (NHS). He - quite rightly - pointed out that I had no knowledge whatsoever of any other system, and suggested that the Canadian system might be better than the NHS.
Since then I've been even more cautious about pontificating about things for which I have insufficient knowledge. So it's possible that for the average person (not the super rich) health care in the USA is better than in - for example - the countries I listed. But I'm doubtful that USA citizens are getting better value for total health care spending than in those countries.
Note: the Kings Fund is an independent organisation dedicated to research to improve UK health care, and I trust it not to have views contaminated by left or right prejudices for or against public or private health care provision. So the statistics on per capita health care spending are probably reasonably accurate. And the following link provides confirmation:
wikipedia
First, my initial reaction to that: A comment brought to Slashdot from the Karl Rove & Lyton Crosby school of political campaigning. And doubtless also from Democrat and Labour campaign strategists, except they at least seem to have enough sense to remain grey eminces, not become part of the campaign.
Second, what I think after re-reading it and realising what you were actually saying. Yes, you're right. And I very much wish you weren't.
"I went to the UK and I was offered investments (backed by their gov!) at 15%" - Citation needed. To my knowledge, the last time British Government investments yielded 15%pa was back in 1991, but inflation was also high. A high rate of return on a government backed investment means either a high risk of default or a high inflation rate. Neither was true of the UK in 2005.
I hope the less prejudiced on either side of the Atlantic are prepared to concede that we both have our fair share of idiots. That said, in favour of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is that if we wait to hear Donald John Trump (see - even Johnson's full name has more panache!) quote in Latin from ancient Romans, we're more likely to see the Sun become a red giant first. I'll grant you that they do have some things in common, for example, hair style. (And being born in America!) But you have to admit that making Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson the British Foreign Secretary has far more style and irony (and is incidentally much less dangerous) than the as yet unrealised election of a President Trump. And I doubt whether for any of his marriages Donald Trump has commissioned a piece for violin by one of the leading contemporary composers.
It's true that you turfed us out in 1776. But to do that you needed a large dollop of help from a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys!
A serious note. Both the UK and the USA have done some stupid things. For example, Eisenhower quite rightly put a stop to the UK's ill-conceived Suez "adventure", and the lack of preparation for what to do after getting rid of Saddam Hussein was criminal.
What I'd like to happen is that in the UK and USA - and in every other country - the voices of reason hold sway over the demagogues. Last week I met a woman from Shanghai who is at the University of Ghent in Belgium. She has a doctorate in Political Science, and I asked her why she'd studied that. She replied that it was because she believed in logic, she was a rational person.
Contrast that with this, which could have been written for Johnson or Trump:
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.
Except that the first would ignore an implied humility in those lines in context, and the other might have never read Walt Whitman.
"Nobody voted for Ryan or Pelosi, and those are the closest match to prime minister." - My initial reaction was that's not even close to the reality. On reflection, an approximation to the post of UK Prime Minister would be the Speaker of the House of Representatives if they also had operational control of the Secretaries of State (most of whom were also members of the House of Representatives) and the armed forces. But they don't, because that's the prerogative of the President of the United States? So, I think the closest match to the UK Prime Minister is the President of the US, but there are substantial differences.
"what they did was standing up and rejecting once again the idea of a unified Europe under German control" - No, that's what about 52% of the people who voted in the recent referendum did. The other 48% (including me) voted to remain in the EU.
And while there may have been some voting for exit because of perceived German dominance, I suspect most were equal opportunity disliking of control by foreigners. (A position with which, to repeat myself, I disagree.)
For what it's worth, given a choice between being led by, say, Donald Trump and Angela Merkel, I'll happily follow Merkel. Actually, given a choice between Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom - the two remaining contenders for leadership of the Conservative Party - I'll go with Angela Merkel. There's something deeply ironic about the next UK prime minister being chosen by about 150,000 people who were largely in favour of exit from the European Union to regain control from an "anti-democratic" institution, with the other 99.6% of the electorate (including me) having no say whatsoever in this.
You cite the example of the British police being (mostly) unarmed, and then suggest the USA police should be disarmed with a mandatory death penalty for killing a USA police officer: you might want to consider that here in the United Kingdom, not only are the police mostly unarmed, but also the death penalty was removed in Britain in 1965 (and in Northern Ireland in 1973), so it's not fear of being judicially killed that's keeping murders of police relatively low. (I'm assuming that the rate of police being killed is higher in the US than the UK - in the true Slashdot spirit, a ten second web search didn't find what I was looking for, so I'll go with what might be the case.)
A minor correction: it's not quite true that "the number of people who have been shot by British cops is zero because they don't have anything to shoot people with"; without searching, I can think of at least two men who have been shot and killed by British police recently: a completely innocent Brazilian whom the police thought might have been a terrorist, and Mark Duggan who had previous criminal convictions. That said, it's true that most UK police are not armed, which, as you say, means they don't have the opportunity to shoot people.
Assuming this Wikipedia list is materially correct, then since 1996 the UK police have killed 41 people, about 2 people per year; the USA population is very roughly five times that of the UK, so the rate for US police seems to be about 50 times the UK rate.
I started at 1996 because if the Wikipedia list is true then nobody was killed by the UK police between 1921 and 1978, which I find more than somewhat unlikely. And the figures do not include deaths in Northern Ireland caused by the British military. According to Wikipedia, between 1969 and 2007 the British military killed 306 people, about 51% being civilians and 41% being republican paralilitaries (presumably the remaining 8% were associated with unionist paramilitaries). In the same period 722 of the British military were killed by paramilitary attacks and 719 died from other causes.
Slashdot Mirror
My experience has often been: ...
First time I have to do something I do it.
Second time I think of how to automate it and wish I'd done that the first time.
Third time
I'm not sure whether it's better to "automate" the first time or to wait to see if the task re-occurs.
"Write-in Campaign... Assange 2016!!!" --The USA already has an egocentric unpleasant candidate for POTUS. Why would you want to extend that to th VP?
Sir John Harington: A witty and erudite figure at the court of Elizabeth I, John Harington is now remembered mainly for two things. One is his cynical epigram on treason: ‘Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.’ The other is his invention of the flush water closet. ... His flush toilet did not catch on and serious improvement of lavatories in England had to wait for the 18th century and the coming of the S-bend.
(I'd actually prepared this one earlier - I'd intended to post the epigram as a reply to an earlier post - I knew the epigram but had to look up who'd said it.)
"No: not always the case, but I have seen this pattern many times."
To put this into context for the rest of us, roughly: what proportion of allegation of domestic violence weere false, what proportion were true?
'If civil suits required a unanimous jury verdict ... and ... an evidence standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" ... the junk suits would melt away'
-- Correct, as would a very large number of non-junk suits, which is not such a good idea.
"testicles the size of blueberries and a cock the shape of a little acorn" - I didn't know Donald Trump posted on slashdot..
Ted Cruz didn't got booed off the stage of the Republican convention because the audience disliked his politics: it was because - for the reasons Cruz gave - he wasn't going to endorse Trump as the Republican candidate. I'll grant you that if there was a popularity contest in the Senate, Cruz would probably be in the 101st position.
Disclaimer: that's the first - and probably the last - time I've defended Ted Cruz. If I lived in the US and my only choice was to vote for Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, I'd probably go to the nearest desert and stick my head in the sand. As it happens, I live in the UK, and we have our own problems with political clowns and demagogues. It's interesting that Donald Trump's former campaign manager had such a low opinion of Trump's supporters that he thought they'd have problems understanding words like "demagogue" and "denominator". And that he has sufficent science expertise to be able to call Stephen Hawking a "so-called genius".
"Your sort of right but wrong. Profit is not the problem with expensive health care."
."
To get one thing out of the way first: I'm in the UK, and I don't think there is anything wrong with profit in providing healthcare, provided the companies/people making the profit are operating in a reasonably free market. That said, I do like a system which provides universal healthcare. (So to parts of the Republican Party I probably seem like a pinko cheese-eating surrender monkey commie.)
"The problem is government involvement and patents."
To quote an AC replying (I think) to another post:
"The thing with healthcare is that some level of care gets provided whether the patient can pay or not. So that raises costs overall.
--So why then is healthcare in the US three times the cost per head in the UK which has universal health care free at the point of use?
So, what that AC already said (subject to the caveat below), plus this graphic from the Kings Fund, a well-respected UK organisation researching healthcare, and a question:
Do you have any evidence that the US is getting value for money by apparently spending about 45% per more of per capita GDP on healthcare than, for example, Germany, which has a similar per capita GDP to that of the US.?
Caveat: gdp per capita: UK about 42,000usd, USA about 53,000usd, about 1.25 times the UK;
healthcare spend as a percentage of GDP: UK about 8.7%, USA about 16.3%, about 1.9 times the UK;
so the US cost per head is about 2.4 times that for the UK.
"There is lots of food just growing out in parks, along trails, and in small streams and creeks. There are people who choose to be homeless and free."
That was a practical option when most people were employed in farming (or, indeed, in hunter-gathering), and you could find some spare land not owned by anyone else. (Or at any rate not owned by anyone you couldn't cheat out of their land.) As you observe there are still some people in modern economies who can live that way. But I suggest that in, for example, the UK or the USA that life style can only sustain relatively few people, and that if large numbers of people tried it now there would be widescale failure of resources and/or fighting over scarce resources. See the posts above by ultranova and Christopher C.
"Most successful people have failed many times before hitting a success." - Avoiding debts by using limited liability or by you or your company declaring bankruptcy is a type of welfare. It may well be that limited liability is necessary to encourage entrepreneurs and limit the consequences of failure, but don't take full advantage of it and then ask the government - and the rest of us who haven't run away from debts - to leave you alone.
"Yes, but vacuum energy still equates to 0 energy and mass *on average*" - Why? Is some vacuum energy negative?
No, it's Trumps all the way down! Or possibly it's some really bright people that will advise Trump all the way down.
"Anything divided by infinite equals 0" -- Large correction: not necessarily. For example, using a non-standard model of the rational (or real) numbers:
(a) any positive finite non-zero number divided by a positive infinite number is a positive infinitesimal number, that is a number greater than 0 but smaller than any positive "standard" number;
(b) if n is a positive infinite number and N is a greater infinite number then N/n is greater than or equal to some finite positive standard number, and might be infinite.
Non-standard analysis
Surreal number - Slashot connection - Donald Knuth invented the name "Surreal number" (one construction of surreal numbers was invented by the mathematician John Horton Conway)
the "useful theater" we do today - reinforcing that, an extract from Beyond the Fringe, The Aftermyth of War
Commander (Peter Cook): Perkins - The war's not going very well. War's a psychological thing, Perkins, rather like a game of football. You know how in a game of football ten men often play better than eleven. Perkins, we're asking you to be that one man. Perkins, I want you to lay down your life. We need a futile gesture at this stage. It'll raise the whole tone of the war. Get up in a crate [RAF slang for an aircraft] Perkins, pop over to Bremen, take a shufti [slang for a look], don't come back. Goodbye Perkins. God I wish I was going too.
Perkins (Jonathan Miller): Goodbye sir - or is it au revoir?
Commander: No, Perkins.
Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel 1969-1974
Before that was Mrs Bandaranaike, Prime Minister of Sri Lanka from 1960 to 2000, with two interruptions. But she was the widow of a former Prime Minister. For example, the recent election of Tsai Ing-wen as President of Taiwan is the first time a woman has led an East Asian country without also being the wife or daughter of a former leader of that country.
Congratulations (genuine) on mentioning and linking to crystal radio sets. Many many years ago for a short time I used a crystal radio set my grandfather had used in the 1930s! Or maybe I tried to use it and couldn't get it to work. But, anyway, thanks for the nostalgia!
"If you want a public health system, move to Canada or the UK. We had the best system in the world, the best doctors, the best hospitals. A competitive system is far superior to a government run bureaucratic mess."
health-care-spending-compared
Do you think that by spending about 40% per capita more on health care than any other country in the world the USA has health care which is on average significantly better than the health care in, for example, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Canada, let alone 40% better?
A true story: many years ago I visited an English friend who at the time was working in Vienna. In a conversation with her Canadian husband, for some reason (I forget the context) I praised the UK National Health Service (NHS). He - quite rightly - pointed out that I had no knowledge whatsoever of any other system, and suggested that the Canadian system might be better than the NHS.
Since then I've been even more cautious about pontificating about things for which I have insufficient knowledge. So it's possible that for the average person (not the super rich) health care in the USA is better than in - for example - the countries I listed. But I'm doubtful that USA citizens are getting better value for total health care spending than in those countries.
Note: the Kings Fund is an independent organisation dedicated to research to improve UK health care, and I trust it not to have views contaminated by left or right prejudices for or against public or private health care provision. So the statistics on per capita health care spending are probably reasonably accurate. And the following link provides confirmation:
wikipedia
"By 1980 there was no news outlet in the US that would give "fair" coverage to any Republican" - Not even The Wall Street Journal?
First, my initial reaction to that: A comment brought to Slashdot from the Karl Rove & Lyton Crosby school of political campaigning. And doubtless also from Democrat and Labour campaign strategists, except they at least seem to have enough sense to remain grey eminces, not become part of the campaign.
Second, what I think after re-reading it and realising what you were actually saying. Yes, you're right. And I very much wish you weren't.
"I went to the UK and I was offered investments (backed by their gov!) at 15%" - Citation needed. To my knowledge, the last time British Government investments yielded 15%pa was back in 1991, but inflation was also high. A high rate of return on a government backed investment means either a high risk of default or a high inflation rate. Neither was true of the UK in 2005.
I hope the less prejudiced on either side of the Atlantic are prepared to concede that we both have our fair share of idiots. That said, in favour of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is that if we wait to hear Donald John Trump (see - even Johnson's full name has more panache!) quote in Latin from ancient Romans, we're more likely to see the Sun become a red giant first. I'll grant you that they do have some things in common, for example, hair style. (And being born in America!) But you have to admit that making Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson the British Foreign Secretary has far more style and irony (and is incidentally much less dangerous) than the as yet unrealised election of a President Trump. And I doubt whether for any of his marriages Donald Trump has commissioned a piece for violin by one of the leading contemporary composers.
.
It's true that you turfed us out in 1776. But to do that you needed a large dollop of help from a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys!
A serious note. Both the UK and the USA have done some stupid things. For example, Eisenhower quite rightly put a stop to the UK's ill-conceived Suez "adventure", and the lack of preparation for what to do after getting rid of Saddam Hussein was criminal.
What I'd like to happen is that in the UK and USA - and in every other country - the voices of reason hold sway over the demagogues. Last week I met a woman from Shanghai who is at the University of Ghent in Belgium. She has a doctorate in Political Science, and I asked her why she'd studied that. She replied that it was because she believed in logic, she was a rational person
Contrast that with this, which could have been written for Johnson or Trump:
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.
Except that the first would ignore an implied humility in those lines in context, and the other might have never read Walt Whitman.
Thank you. I'd wondered what on earth "Farcical aquatic ceremony" was. (I don't think I've seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail in full.)
"Nobody voted for Ryan or Pelosi, and those are the closest match to prime minister." - My initial reaction was that's not even close to the reality. On reflection, an approximation to the post of UK Prime Minister would be the Speaker of the House of Representatives if they also had operational control of the Secretaries of State (most of whom were also members of the House of Representatives) and the armed forces. But they don't, because that's the prerogative of the President of the United States? So, I think the closest match to the UK Prime Minister is the President of the US, but there are substantial differences.
"what they did was standing up and rejecting once again the idea of a unified Europe under German control" - No, that's what about 52% of the people who voted in the recent referendum did. The other 48% (including me) voted to remain in the EU.
And while there may have been some voting for exit because of perceived German dominance, I suspect most were equal opportunity disliking of control by foreigners. (A position with which, to repeat myself, I disagree.)
For what it's worth, given a choice between being led by, say, Donald Trump and Angela Merkel, I'll happily follow Merkel. Actually, given a choice between Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom - the two remaining contenders for leadership of the Conservative Party - I'll go with Angela Merkel. There's something deeply ironic about the next UK prime minister being chosen by about 150,000 people who were largely in favour of exit from the European Union to regain control from an "anti-democratic" institution, with the other 99.6% of the electorate (including me) having no say whatsoever in this.
You cite the example of the British police being (mostly) unarmed, and then suggest the USA police should be disarmed with a mandatory death penalty for killing a USA police officer: you might want to consider that here in the United Kingdom, not only are the police mostly unarmed, but also the death penalty was removed in Britain in 1965 (and in Northern Ireland in 1973), so it's not fear of being judicially killed that's keeping murders of police relatively low. (I'm assuming that the rate of police being killed is higher in the US than the UK - in the true Slashdot spirit, a ten second web search didn't find what I was looking for, so I'll go with what might be the case.)
A minor correction: it's not quite true that "the number of people who have been shot by British cops is zero because they don't have anything to shoot people with"; without searching, I can think of at least two men who have been shot and killed by British police recently: a completely innocent Brazilian whom the police thought might have been a terrorist, and Mark Duggan who had previous criminal convictions. That said, it's true that most UK police are not armed, which, as you say, means they don't have the opportunity to shoot people.
Assuming this Wikipedia list is materially correct, then since 1996 the UK police have killed 41 people, about 2 people per year; the USA population is very roughly five times that of the UK, so the rate for US police seems to be about 50 times the UK rate.
I started at 1996 because if the Wikipedia list is true then nobody was killed by the UK police between 1921 and 1978, which I find more than somewhat unlikely. And the figures do not include deaths in Northern Ireland caused by the British military. According to Wikipedia, between 1969 and 2007 the British military killed 306 people, about 51% being civilians and 41% being republican paralilitaries (presumably the remaining 8% were associated with unionist paramilitaries). In the same period 722 of the British military were killed by paramilitary attacks and 719 died from other causes.