"Replace the minimum wage with a minimum income of $15/hr for every man/woman/child in the US with no requirements or limitations save citizenship."
What would that serve for? Say you can live *now* on 15x8x5=600$/week. Now, give everybody 600$/week for free. Next week prices will be adjusted so you now need 1200$/week as a minimum. Economists usually don't know that much for a prediction, but that, they can guarantee you and be true.
Of course yes! It was Henry Ford the one telling people he wanted for his cars to be sold to everybody and even told everybody that's why he payed his workers money enough for them to become his customers.
Henry Ford's factory wasn't an anarchist's dream but a system driven with iron fist by Henry Ford: he was the one settling the plans and making them public since he held both the knowledge and authority to do so: he was the required governance to make things happen.
"That is not how things get made. The real world works without plans for the most part - certainly without plans by committee. That is what the central planners always miss"
Still *ALL* big corporations work under a central planning system and most are run by comitee (the board of directors' one). Central planning and comitees must have something when nobody even tries to run a corp in any different way.
"The ultimate solution would be to remove money from the necessities of life... a pie-in-the-sky idea would be if everyone (whether they are completely broke or a multi-billionaire) is granted public housing, food, schooling, medical care, and basic clothing"
You have a point... and a non-sequitur. Yes, you could have the government grant "goods and services", which avoids the problem of granting free money (inflation for no real benefit). No this doesn't mean money needs to be removed: government (and everybody else) still could and should pay with money (in the case of government either to private business for the goods and services or to public employees if it is public companies the ones to produce them).
"In any case that is usually the solution I offer once 90% of jobs are automated away... no one is ready for that now."
Talk about USA if that's what you think, but everybody else seems quite ready for that right now: after all many countries already grant public school and medical care "for free" (payed by taxes) and it just would be a matter of doing the same for shelter, food and clothing. It is not the people but the big tycoons which oppose that, not only about shelter, food and clothing but also strongly pressing to destroy socialized health and school systems: they may be good for the people but reduce the profits they can syphon out from society towards their pockets.
"I'm assuming you mean individual Americans....wouldn't someone in Europe end-up paying the same amount for the drug as well?"
No, we don't. You forget about two basic premises: 1) Price has little to nothing to do with cost. 2) In Europe healthcare is socialized.
1) means that in every market the producer will set the highest price it can go with. 2) means that you are either in the country-wide list of approved prescription drugs (which is something you need to negotiate at country level) or you basicallly aren't going to sell a pill.
Both together mean that you in USA are subsidizing profits that big pharma is not managing to go with in EU.
Point in case: just few months away Spanish government was in negotiations with Gilead about the cost of Sovaldi (very effective against Hepatitis C) in order for this drug to enter the "white list" that makes it to be payed by the public system. The first Gilead's price was around 60000 per patient (down from 80000 it costs in USA) while government wanted to pay about 25000. While in negotiations, the issue became a public concern in Spain which, obviously, made the negotiations even harder: Gilead thought that this would allow them to sell the drug at full price (pressure was in the government's side: they were "killing" people by not allowing the public system to prescribe Sovaldi) while government pressed back telling it was Gilead the "murderers" by not selling Sovaldi at a fair price and even menaced with secuestering Gilead's patent (more or less what USA did in the Anthrax case). In the end a price about 45000 was settled (you see, about 50% of USA's) and this year, after Brussels approval, Sovaldi is going to be retired in favour of a new drug combo (Bristol Mayers' Daklinza plus Abbvie's Exviera and Viekirax) which lowers the price down to 30000 (still cheaper of what you'd pay for them in USA).
So, you see, bargaining at a high level and not having to pay back to the seller does in fact impact prices.
"this is what we expect our government to do, i.e., make up for the shortfalls of private industry"
Are you sure?
Because if that's the case, you are immediately admitting government business being always at a loss (if they worked at a profit, private industry would gladly cope with it). Operating at a loss means increasing operating inputs AKA taxes but, hey, taxes are evil, aren't they? You could cut the tax bleeding by allowing government to apply not only for losing propositions but also for profiting business but that would be anticompetitive, wouldn't it?
"Implement a basic guaranteed income, and now we'll make all kinds of other jobs programs"
While I fully agree with the underlying idea "everybody will have his basic needs covered in this country", the basic income is a very stupid idea with limitations shown once and again in history. Produce tomorrow a basic income and you will have *guaranteed* inflation to make for the new money flowing into the system the day after tomorrow. Net benefit: zero. And you can be reassured there will be middle men in the 0.1 top percent that will absorb most of that money toward their pockets (that's not guaranteed, just heavily suspected).
"That's what New Space wants to do but nobody knows what their real plans are"
Because in order for you to know what their plans are, they need to settle on the plans themselves, then they need to set who's the one both knowledgeable enough and authoritative enough to factually make the plans public, and then they need enough governance to make the plans stable enough for their completion.
In summary: in order for you to know their plans, they need to add up more and more government which happens to be what makes things "more complicated, it costs more money, and people get hurt.".
Yes, I do have an MBA, but I only enrolled after more than 20 years of real technical background (and I mean real, not just knowing the buzzwords and managing people who have the technical knowledge), so I can see both sides of the pond.
I see your point and you are probably right, but this doesn't mean this guy doesn't bring his own luggage which happens to be good knowledge and expertise for the position; it's only that it is not *all* the required knowledge and expertise he should bring to the position.
"You understand that control and security in the network context is real stuff, access control, physical control of the network cables run, , encryption, firewalls, routing, permissions. Not some fluffy vague concept of crime."
Except that, well, it isn't. Control and security in corporate environment is all about money, legal liability and reputation. That's my point and that's why I said that probably Lance Weaver is more fitted to understand it than your average nerdo which really believes what you say above. The pity is that I'd want to see in an executive position somebody that understands that but also knows how network cables, encryption, firewalls, routing, permissions, etc. fit into the equation, which probably this one guy doesn't.
"You buy servers not cloud."
Of course you buy servers, not cloud. But you use them to build cloud, not a "nerd's collection of fancy hardware". If it allows for self service, metered consumption and automation, it is a cloud. If its only customers belong to the same corp that deployed the solution or, at least, the solution has been deployed for a single tenant, it is a private cloud.
"Your users connect across the public internet, across a set of ISPs with which you have no SLA agreement, you do not control and he cannot even list the ISPs that GE data will cross on its way to a 'cloud' provider."
You don't have much an idea about how big corporate deployments work, do you?
"He has taken two of those systems out of GE control and outside GE management."
Which, as I already told, will probably mean easier liability management for him.
"HR need to tighten up their recruitment"
The moment recruitment is strictly controlled by HR instead of the business units that need the people is the moment you are better off outsourcing services. Guaranteed.
"So you didn't add capacity internally, you bought it externally, and thus lost the biggest advantage of using your own servers: control and security."
Taken from another poster above... "Lance Weaver is the Chief Technology Officer for Cloud at GE Corporate.... Lance holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice from Truman State University."
So he probably knows nothing about computers but he probably knows about the real cost and value of "control and security" better than you.
"There is no such thing as 'private cloud'."
Of course there is.
"You ran these apps on servers YOU controlled, then you moved those apps to servers controlled BY OTHER COMPANIES ACROSS THE INTERNET."
So what? In fact, given Weaver's background he probably would say "so much the better".
"Hopefully you put in the fallback plan for if the company fails, and take regular backups of your data on their servers to make sure you still keep it."
As in "that's a side effect from your decision of going to a public provider because if you hosted internally you wouldn't need to have backup plans in case your datacenter goes boom nor backups to make sure you data is still there"?
"You ran these apps on servers YOU controlled"
You can bet Mr Lance Weaver neither controls the company's internal servers nor will control those externalized. In all cases he will be delegating to a third party, even within his company, but it is much easier to deflect blame and sue when it is an external company the one that can be shown responsible.
"What happens when the spotty youth they hired hands your app data to his frat friend? "
And who says your own company won't be the one hiring the spotty youth? Difference being that if it is *your* company the one hiring the spotty youth under your direct line of command, *you* are in trouble. If it is a service company it is that company the one in trouble.
""Sooner or later you run out of Other People's Money". Please shoot me down here. I've never come up with a good answer to the above that wasn't so long winded I lost anyone I was talking to..."
What about "Sooner or later you run out of your Own Money Too", so what?
"Yes, it also CAN cause costly boondoggles because there's little incentive for a cost/benefit analysis."
The contra-argument is that cost/benefit analysis are boondoggles by themselves when looking too afar/too in the blue sky, so having a (reduced) place where you can forget about those cost/benefit analysis is a savvy proposition in the long run.
Almost by definition, if the cost/benefit analysis is easy and clear and the ROI comparation between investment choices is obvious, you don't need the government for that as private investment is good enough by itself. The corollary, of course, is that you can't be too strict about cost/benefit analysis and ROI of (some parts of) government because the kind of things left to government are the ones that can't be managed by cost/benefit/ROI analysis.
"Someone wants to make an argument that government investment into science and technology doesn't lead to anything useful on the internet?"
No one but you.
In fact, this is the most astounding case of non-sequitur I've seen in quite long years reading on Slashdot, because it percolates both the article, its abstract and most of the comments. Quite a feat.
The article and the abstract basically reduce to "technology this, technology that, therefore basic science..." What!?
Now, what about you? Assuming the article made sense, -which it doesn't, its point is technology/science can do just OK in private hands, so no need for public money/grants here, it says nothing about the results of pushing public money on it. For all that matters, public money could and can make wonders, the article doesn't even try to deny that, but that public money is not *needed* to make those wonders happen -not, at least nowadays.
But of course, the article talks about how *applied technology* can and do flourish under private hands once the need arises and it's properly understood and focused by companies/entrepeneurs, which is more or less true, at least in the sort/mid term, and then goes for the giant quantum leap of saying that the same goes for basic science with absolutely no evidence in favour, and the obvious argument against it that it is even explicited in the article itself: if "basic science research does not lead to technological innovation, and therefore isn't deserving of taxpayer funding" obviously much less will it deserve for-profit granted money! so, in the end, no money will be flushed towards basic science *at all*. That this is a long-term sensible strategy looks abundantly doubtful.
"I would agree that, yes, we _could_ let the free market take care of the issue: if people want to give their children a sub-standard education, they will be less competitive in the national and global markets, and they will be competed out of viability within a few generations."
It's only that capitalism and free market wouldn't be working *on* the labour means but on those controlling the means of production. So it might well be not those people being "less competitive" but just "more abused" and the business abusing them being in fact more competitive thus leading a race to the bottom for everyone else.
Arguably it can be said that this is in fact already happening: people in third world countries are not competed out because of their lower life standards but just abused more by transnational corporations and it is first world workers the ones outcompeted by them.
"The primary reserve currency and the one oil is denominated in belongs to the US. People like having US debt -- so far."
That's (so far) true. On the other hand, dollar share as foreign reserve has been steadily declining all this century in favor of... the Spanish currency, being the ratio now about 2:1 dollar:euro.
"If you're even upper middle class you can easily avoid coal death by living in the suburbs. "
That's very, very wrong because of the same reason the above is right.
A Chernobyl-level accident impacts both rich and poor because of the vast area potentially involved but just the same happens about coal: it is in the air you breath even thousands of kilometers away from the source so, no you are not safe just moving to a different neighborhood.
"The trouble I have with nukes is that everyone in the world believes in the myth of gov't inefficiency."
As in Chernobyl wasn't government run? I do believe government is inefficient... because of its vast size and misalignment between citizenship's and civil servants' interests and incentives... and exactly the same can be said about big corporations and the misalignment between citizenship's, customer's and management's interests and incentives.
Slashdot Mirror
"Without hard work, humans become listless and unhappy."
Yes. Ancient Athens' agora probes your point.
Oh, wait!
"Replace the minimum wage with a minimum income of $15/hr for every man/woman/child in the US with no requirements or limitations save citizenship."
What would that serve for? Say you can live *now* on 15x8x5=600$/week. Now, give everybody 600$/week for free. Next week prices will be adjusted so you now need 1200$/week as a minimum. Economists usually don't know that much for a prediction, but that, they can guarantee you and be true.
"If you're a manager and you did this in private industry you'd be out of a job, and no one would hire you."
On the other, hand, if you were a CEO instead of just a manager, you'd end up with a golden parachute and people fighting to be the next hiring you.
"As my late father used to say, the Golden Gate Bridge could never be built today."
What!? Didn't you rebuilt it after Magneto's mess?
"Did someone know Henry Ford's plans?"
Of course yes! It was Henry Ford the one telling people he wanted for his cars to be sold to everybody and even told everybody that's why he payed his workers money enough for them to become his customers.
Henry Ford's factory wasn't an anarchist's dream but a system driven with iron fist by Henry Ford: he was the one settling the plans and making them public since he held both the knowledge and authority to do so: he was the required governance to make things happen.
"That is not how things get made. The real world works without plans for the most part - certainly without plans by committee. That is what the central planners always miss"
Still *ALL* big corporations work under a central planning system and most are run by comitee (the board of directors' one). Central planning and comitees must have something when nobody even tries to run a corp in any different way.
"The ultimate solution would be to remove money from the necessities of life... a pie-in-the-sky idea would be if everyone (whether they are completely broke or a multi-billionaire) is granted public housing, food, schooling, medical care, and basic clothing"
You have a point... and a non-sequitur. Yes, you could have the government grant "goods and services", which avoids the problem of granting free money (inflation for no real benefit). No this doesn't mean money needs to be removed: government (and everybody else) still could and should pay with money (in the case of government either to private business for the goods and services or to public employees if it is public companies the ones to produce them).
"In any case that is usually the solution I offer once 90% of jobs are automated away... no one is ready for that now."
Talk about USA if that's what you think, but everybody else seems quite ready for that right now: after all many countries already grant public school and medical care "for free" (payed by taxes) and it just would be a matter of doing the same for shelter, food and clothing. It is not the people but the big tycoons which oppose that, not only about shelter, food and clothing but also strongly pressing to destroy socialized health and school systems: they may be good for the people but reduce the profits they can syphon out from society towards their pockets.
"I'm assuming you mean individual Americans....wouldn't someone in Europe end-up paying the same amount for the drug as well?"
No, we don't. You forget about two basic premises:
1) Price has little to nothing to do with cost.
2) In Europe healthcare is socialized.
1) means that in every market the producer will set the highest price it can go with.
2) means that you are either in the country-wide list of approved prescription drugs (which is something you need to negotiate at country level) or you basicallly aren't going to sell a pill.
Both together mean that you in USA are subsidizing profits that big pharma is not managing to go with in EU.
Point in case: just few months away Spanish government was in negotiations with Gilead about the cost of Sovaldi (very effective against Hepatitis C) in order for this drug to enter the "white list" that makes it to be payed by the public system. The first Gilead's price was around 60000 per patient (down from 80000 it costs in USA) while government wanted to pay about 25000. While in negotiations, the issue became a public concern in Spain which, obviously, made the negotiations even harder: Gilead thought that this would allow them to sell the drug at full price (pressure was in the government's side: they were "killing" people by not allowing the public system to prescribe Sovaldi) while government pressed back telling it was Gilead the "murderers" by not selling Sovaldi at a fair price and even menaced with secuestering Gilead's patent (more or less what USA did in the Anthrax case). In the end a price about 45000 was settled (you see, about 50% of USA's) and this year, after Brussels approval, Sovaldi is going to be retired in favour of a new drug combo (Bristol Mayers' Daklinza plus Abbvie's Exviera and Viekirax) which lowers the price down to 30000 (still cheaper of what you'd pay for them in USA).
So, you see, bargaining at a high level and not having to pay back to the seller does in fact impact prices.
"Big Pharma has a point. It costs one hell of a lot of money to take a random, complex molecule and try to make an economic product out of it."
Within current socio-economic system.
Maybe it's time to look at the flaws and limitations of current socio-economic system and look for ways to alleviate them.
"It's fiendishly expensive and time consuming to get a regulatory approval for a drug for human medical use in the USA"
And that is so because big pharma has shown not to be able to work under any less stringent environment (think thalidomide).
"this is what we expect our government to do, i.e., make up for the shortfalls of private industry"
Are you sure?
Because if that's the case, you are immediately admitting government business being always at a loss (if they worked at a profit, private industry would gladly cope with it). Operating at a loss means increasing operating inputs AKA taxes but, hey, taxes are evil, aren't they? You could cut the tax bleeding by allowing government to apply not only for losing propositions but also for profiting business but that would be anticompetitive, wouldn't it?
So, again, what's your point?
"Implement a basic guaranteed income, and now we'll make all kinds of other jobs programs"
While I fully agree with the underlying idea "everybody will have his basic needs covered in this country", the basic income is a very stupid idea with limitations shown once and again in history. Produce tomorrow a basic income and you will have *guaranteed* inflation to make for the new money flowing into the system the day after tomorrow. Net benefit: zero. And you can be reassured there will be middle men in the 0.1 top percent that will absorb most of that money toward their pockets (that's not guaranteed, just heavily suspected).
"AFAIC if you are a 'normal, empathic human being' you should not be allowed to vote."
Interesting idea, even more coming from somebody as deeply stupid as roman_mir.
Of course, the problem is that people is the way it is so what you are really saying is democracy is not a sounded government paradigm.
People of all times and backgrounds have sustained that same idea, nobody has been able in practice to come up with a better alternative.
PS: You didn't provide any alternative either.
"Even antibiotics that aren't protected by patents are expensive."
No, they aren't.
" I don't see how patents are protecting antibiotic profits right now anyway."
Therefore it's not patents the ones the push incentives forward right now. Therefore, why patents at all?
"That's what New Space wants to do but nobody knows what their real plans are"
Because in order for you to know what their plans are, they need to settle on the plans themselves, then they need to set who's the one both knowledgeable enough and authoritative enough to factually make the plans public, and then they need enough governance to make the plans stable enough for their completion.
In summary: in order for you to know their plans, they need to add up more and more government which happens to be what makes things "more complicated, it costs more money, and people get hurt.".
"Must have features GPS, bluetooth and music storage for roughly 5 hours of use during a marathon. Pretty much everything else is a nice to have."
Nobody else found funny that for a sport watch a clock/chronograph is not among the "must haves"? And it supposedly is a "smart" one!
"Do you have an MBA by any chance?"
Yes, I do have an MBA, but I only enrolled after more than 20 years of real technical background (and I mean real, not just knowing the buzzwords and managing people who have the technical knowledge), so I can see both sides of the pond.
I see your point and you are probably right, but this doesn't mean this guy doesn't bring his own luggage which happens to be good knowledge and expertise for the position; it's only that it is not *all* the required knowledge and expertise he should bring to the position.
"You understand that control and security in the network context is real stuff, access control, physical control of the network cables run, , encryption, firewalls, routing, permissions. Not some fluffy vague concept of crime."
Except that, well, it isn't. Control and security in corporate environment is all about money, legal liability and reputation. That's my point and that's why I said that probably Lance Weaver is more fitted to understand it than your average nerdo which really believes what you say above. The pity is that I'd want to see in an executive position somebody that understands that but also knows how network cables, encryption, firewalls, routing, permissions, etc. fit into the equation, which probably this one guy doesn't.
"You buy servers not cloud."
Of course you buy servers, not cloud. But you use them to build cloud, not a "nerd's collection of fancy hardware". If it allows for self service, metered consumption and automation, it is a cloud. If its only customers belong to the same corp that deployed the solution or, at least, the solution has been deployed for a single tenant, it is a private cloud.
"Your users connect across the public internet, across a set of ISPs with which you have no SLA agreement, you do not control and he cannot even list the ISPs that GE data will cross on its way to a 'cloud' provider."
You don't have much an idea about how big corporate deployments work, do you?
"He has taken two of those systems out of GE control and outside GE management."
Which, as I already told, will probably mean easier liability management for him.
"HR need to tighten up their recruitment"
The moment recruitment is strictly controlled by HR instead of the business units that need the people is the moment you are better off outsourcing services. Guaranteed.
"So you didn't add capacity internally, you bought it externally, and thus lost the biggest advantage of using your own servers: control and security."
Taken from another poster above... "Lance Weaver is the Chief Technology Officer for Cloud at GE Corporate. ... Lance holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice from Truman State University."
So he probably knows nothing about computers but he probably knows about the real cost and value of "control and security" better than you.
"There is no such thing as 'private cloud'."
Of course there is.
"You ran these apps on servers YOU controlled, then you moved those apps to servers controlled BY OTHER COMPANIES ACROSS THE INTERNET."
So what? In fact, given Weaver's background he probably would say "so much the better".
"Hopefully you put in the fallback plan for if the company fails, and take regular backups of your data on their servers to make sure you still keep it."
As in "that's a side effect from your decision of going to a public provider because if you hosted internally you wouldn't need to have backup plans in case your datacenter goes boom nor backups to make sure you data is still there"?
"You ran these apps on servers YOU controlled"
You can bet Mr Lance Weaver neither controls the company's internal servers nor will control those externalized. In all cases he will be delegating to a third party, even within his company, but it is much easier to deflect blame and sue when it is an external company the one that can be shown responsible.
"What happens when the spotty youth they hired hands your app data to his frat friend? "
And who says your own company won't be the one hiring the spotty youth? Difference being that if it is *your* company the one hiring the spotty youth under your direct line of command, *you* are in trouble. If it is a service company it is that company the one in trouble.
""Sooner or later you run out of Other People's Money".
Please shoot me down here. I've never come up with a good answer to the above that wasn't so long winded I lost anyone I was talking to..."
What about "Sooner or later you run out of your Own Money Too", so what?
"Yes, it also CAN cause costly boondoggles because there's little incentive for a cost/benefit analysis."
The contra-argument is that cost/benefit analysis are boondoggles by themselves when looking too afar/too in the blue sky, so having a (reduced) place where you can forget about those cost/benefit analysis is a savvy proposition in the long run.
Almost by definition, if the cost/benefit analysis is easy and clear and the ROI comparation between investment choices is obvious, you don't need the government for that as private investment is good enough by itself. The corollary, of course, is that you can't be too strict about cost/benefit analysis and ROI of (some parts of) government because the kind of things left to government are the ones that can't be managed by cost/benefit/ROI analysis.
"Someone wants to make an argument that government investment into science and technology doesn't lead to anything useful on the internet?"
No one but you.
In fact, this is the most astounding case of non-sequitur I've seen in quite long years reading on Slashdot, because it percolates both the article, its abstract and most of the comments. Quite a feat.
The article and the abstract basically reduce to "technology this, technology that, therefore basic science..." What!?
Now, what about you? Assuming the article made sense, -which it doesn't, its point is technology/science can do just OK in private hands, so no need for public money/grants here, it says nothing about the results of pushing public money on it. For all that matters, public money could and can make wonders, the article doesn't even try to deny that, but that public money is not *needed* to make those wonders happen -not, at least nowadays.
But of course, the article talks about how *applied technology* can and do flourish under private hands once the need arises and it's properly understood and focused by companies/entrepeneurs, which is more or less true, at least in the sort/mid term, and then goes for the giant quantum leap of saying that the same goes for basic science with absolutely no evidence in favour, and the obvious argument against it that it is even explicited in the article itself: if "basic science research does not lead to technological innovation, and therefore isn't deserving of taxpayer funding" obviously much less will it deserve for-profit granted money! so, in the end, no money will be flushed towards basic science *at all*. That this is a long-term sensible strategy looks abundantly doubtful.
"I would agree that, yes, we _could_ let the free market take care of the issue: if people want to give their children a sub-standard education, they will be less competitive in the national and global markets, and they will be competed out of viability within a few generations."
It's only that capitalism and free market wouldn't be working *on* the labour means but on those controlling the means of production. So it might well be not those people being "less competitive" but just "more abused" and the business abusing them being in fact more competitive thus leading a race to the bottom for everyone else.
Arguably it can be said that this is in fact already happening: people in third world countries are not competed out because of their lower life standards but just abused more by transnational corporations and it is first world workers the ones outcompeted by them.
"The primary reserve currency and the one oil is denominated in belongs to the US. People like having US debt -- so far."
That's (so far) true. On the other hand, dollar share as foreign reserve has been steadily declining all this century in favor of... the Spanish currency, being the ratio now about 2:1 dollar:euro.
"Nuclear hits everybody, rich or poor."
That's right.
"If you're even upper middle class you can easily avoid coal death by living in the suburbs. "
That's very, very wrong because of the same reason the above is right.
A Chernobyl-level accident impacts both rich and poor because of the vast area potentially involved but just the same happens about coal: it is in the air you breath even thousands of kilometers away from the source so, no you are not safe just moving to a different neighborhood.
"The trouble I have with nukes is that everyone in the world believes in the myth of gov't inefficiency."
As in Chernobyl wasn't government run? I do believe government is inefficient... because of its vast size and misalignment between citizenship's and civil servants' interests and incentives... and exactly the same can be said about big corporations and the misalignment between citizenship's, customer's and management's interests and incentives.