Re:It'll never make it through FDA trials
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Cancer Cured By HIV
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At some point you have to realize that there simply is no need for at least half of the population in the US isn't needed for any sort of labor. In the last 50 years or so we have gone from an economy where everyone that could work had a job waiting for them to an economy where now there simply are no jobs available. Automation and improved processes have eliminated the need, as have the complete removal of most manufacturing from the US.
The idea seems to be that everyone that used to work in a factory can now be retrained to be a "knowledge worker" or some such. There are a couple of problems with that idea so it really isn't going to work out that way, but no matter what, there simply aren't any job openings. The end result is that the US as a country can either push the unemployed to the street or the government can support them. Maybe with make-work jobs (one group digs holes, the next group fills them in), maybe with just a check so they can sit at home and watch the Home Shopping Channel.
Exactly the same feelings that the majority of people had in Moscow when the Czar's troops started firing on rioters in the streets.
Sorry, but this is the new way of dealing with political differences in democratic countries. There are no us vs. them because if you aren't on the rioter's side then you are part of the oppressing government. Everyone. There are no innocent bystanders.
In a democratic country, there is no distinction between government officials and "fellow citizens".
All "fellow citizens" that do not agree with your political stand are indeed oppressing you. They are clearly part of the problem until your beliefs have made it to the majority. All you can do is make it so that your position becomes the majority, and until it does, pretty much anything goes.
The idea that you should respect others, not damage property, etc. etc. etc. is a utterly outmoded position and holds no sway with current political activists. We are going to see this happen in the US, probably right after the next election because no matter who wins, they are not going to be able to fix the economic problems we have gotten ourselves in. We have been voting for largess from the government for a long time now and the bill is finally coming due - unfortunately, we aren't able to pay it. We can mortgage our future as long as someone is willing to buy it, but even that is becoming somewhat in doubt.
What's left? Rioting, burning buildings, killing people that don't agree with you. Futile as it may be, at least it makes people feel better about things. For a little while.
What you are trying to describe here is something called abstract symbol manipulation. Some people can do it, others cannot.
The problem for people conceptually is that you are dealing with manipulating object Q through a symbolic relationship with object X. Even when both objects are real-world things the abstraction of the relationship between X and Q stymies some people. They don't get it, they don't understand the relationship and they are never going to. The same person that can't do this then can take a screwdriver and put something together that utterly frustrated someone else. The two abilities are not related in the slightest bit and this confuses people still further.
It is important to understand that this is not a learned ability. You either can do abstract symbol manipulation or you can't. You cannot teach it, you don't "get better at it with practice" and the people that cannot do it will never pick it up. Probably the best analogy is sort of a left-brain vs. right-brain kind of thing. There is no doubt that there is a physical manifestation to this in the brain.
What this means is that the RMSish idea that we should all be programmers and we can only truly be free by being programmers is utter hogwash. It also means that anyone beleiving that all we have to do is retrain assembly line workers and they can be "knowledge workers" in the new economy is barking up the wrong tree. Taking someone that is doing a good job at manipulating physical objects and assuming them to be able to be trained them to manipulate symbolic objects is in for a surprise. As I suspect a great number of people in the adult education field have found and not bothered to tell too many people.
Jerry Pournelle has touched on this subject some in his non-fiction writings and it is worth digging out as much as you possibly can about this. If people do not understand this - people in education, people in business and people in goverment - we are going to see some very tough times ahead. From everything I have seen, people do not understand this at all and most people in education, business and government think it is just a matter of training. They are wrong. We aren't talking about people that are disabled in any sense, but if we don't correct people's impressions of this and how it is immutable we are going to build a society where these people truly are disabled.
Gosh, if this is true, how come you haven't heard about it? Because it is rather subtle and it certainly imparts a certain class separation which people do not like.
The next question is the really hard one. If some significant percentage of people simply cannot become "knowledge workers" or "abstract symbol manipulators" in the new economy and all the factory jobs disappear, just exactly what are these people supposed to do? If the mission is to send everyone through college so they can learn to use computers to manipulate abstract symbols, what happens to the people that can't?
The motivation to clone is that it is cheaper and less risky. Someone else has already done the research and they have already tested the marketplace. Therefore, the cloner has a much better chance of success and can probably introduce a product at a lower price.
Obviously, if there were no impedements to this we would have only cloners and nobody doing anything except copying what someone else has already introduced. I can't imagine any company approving spending money on something "new" when they could back something "proven" instead. New would be clearly associated with risk and the possiblity of coming out with a real loser, whereas simply cloning what is already a success ensures success.
The point is that today if such things were eliminated, Apple would be out of business in a month. Why wouldn't some company in China simply reproduce the iPad, iPhone, iXYZ, whatever for half the price? And, considering it cost them a tenth of the manufacturing cost (using 100% slave laber as opposed to Foxconn using people that are only 3/4th slaves), it would be extremely profitable.
For a month. Until someone else copied it yet again.
I'm really not sure why we aren't seeing a flood of iPad clones in the US. Some of them with backwards Apple logos on them and the like. The only thing I can imagine is that with the hardware and firmware copied such devices are blocked from connecting to iTunes meaning the cloners would have to (very expensively) set up their own servers and such.
Is being offered a $200 fine in exchange for a court hearing for a traffic ticket "extortion"? How about $500? You build up enough precedent and it just might be.
I would think there would be no bar against a much wider applicability of this sort of decision and pushing things along the line of saying that settlements and fines in exchange for opting out of a legal proceeding in court are all extortionate.
This sort of thing didn't use to exist at all. You filed suit against someone and their were no real options other than proceeding. Similarly, no prosecutor before maybe 1950 would ever offer a defendant an opportunity to just pay a big fine rather than go through a trial, even for a traffic ticket. If the ticket demanded a court appearance, that was what you got. And the cop had to show up and testify. Today, this mostly never happens - people just pay the fine and accept the extortion.
I can easily envision a legal environment where there is no possibility of pre-trial settlements. Both parties have to show up, personally - no lawyers without clients. Now this does have the effect of making a lawsuit of any kind start to get really, really expensive and painful. But maybe that is what is needed.
There is truth in large numbers and concensus. If you don't have concensus, then you don't have truth. So whatever you are writing if it isn't agreed with by the majority (or even the minority of powerful people in the Wiki world), you are wasting your time and theirs.
This is the logical outgrowth of much of the counter-culture movement beginning in the 1950s and it isn't going to disappear easily.
The reality is that well-researched material is difficult and time consuming. You can get maybe 50-60% of the material that makes up what an encyclopedia was in the 1980s from people with passion and dedication but after that you are faced with just a lot of work. Work for no compensation other than ego-boosting.
This reality has been utterly rejected by the Walesian philosphy of knowledge in which there is no real "truth" there is just concensus.
What they are left with is a whole bunch of stuff of unknown quality that people with various passions have written over the years. OK, admittedly some of it is accurate and good but there is no telling what. There is plenty that was written by someone with an agenda and Wikipedia made (and continues to make) it possible for someone with enough dedication to block anyone from corrupting their perfect treatise. Eventually, it is going to be left alone even if the original contributor departs.
The amount of passion that is out there for people to spend time writing and defending their turf in the Wikipedia world just isn't enough for the whole thing to work consistently for a long period of time. Sure, there might be a base of the truly hardcore, but it isn't enough. They seem to have some kind of rating now so people can continue to tune the text according to concensus, but concensus isn't important except in that Walesian dimension. As someone pointed out earlier what you tend to get with enforced concensus is the million-monkeys effect. While it is entirely possible you can get another Shakespear you absolutely will get a lot of drivel. What concensus does is form that drivel according to social norms so it isn't recognized. It is still nothing but the regurgitated ramblings of pop culture.
How do you fix this? Well, I don't think it is possible. Walesian philosophy says that in large numbers there is truth and all truths are equal. With that in mind, what possible hope does a real subject matter expert have? Sure, there might be a few with real passion to tell the world their views on genetics, high energy particle physics or the social orders in ancient Egypt. But they chances they are going to win out over the concensus belief system are small indeed. It was an interesting experiment and it isn't entirely surprising that it lasted as long as it has. But passions move on and Jimmy is unlikely to find much passion out there filling in the cracks in what has been built or taking over what has been abandoned.
Today there is some excess capacity that can be transferred between states. An example is a goodly part of California is run from the Palo Verde nuclear plant outside Phoenix. It isn't practical today to build a power plant in California, so they take what they can get from Arizona.
This is coming to an end real soon. Arizona does not have infinite capacity to supply California. As demand in Arizona grows less and less will be available for California. The result will be that stuff starts getting turned off in homes during the day to keep the offices powered, and vice-versa in the evenings. Sure, there will likely be plenty of capacity available at night - but if you want to run something that takes as much power as the home air conditioner you may want to think about turning the air conditioner off while you are doing it.
The US hasn't built a major power plant since some time in the 1970s from what I understand. We have built thousands of "peeker plants" which are natural gas fired and the intent was that these would only be turned on to support the grid in periods of high demand.
They are all or almost all running 24x7 today.
Can't build a power plant without community agreement and you aren't going to get that. Nobody wants a power plant in their backyard and the current government regulations require community input and lots of environment impact studies. The end result is no more power plants and no new transmission lines.
The US could probably use 100 2000GW plants right now, for both new capacity and replacing obsolete coal-fired plants. They are not being built, not scheduled to be built and anywhere past a licensing stage.
We are on the ragged edge of capacity on the generation side, but there is currently enough to go around most of the time. People are going to have remote-cutoff controls put on air conditioning and other high-use devices soon, but the overall impact should be small. Unless of course there is continued growth in demand. Since the native US population is shrinking you would think this wouldn't be a problem. Except every new immigrant (legal or illegal) is another 10-20 KWh on the grid and we are getting 100,000 of them a year.
Yes, transmission is a problem, but the problem is made much worse because of the social issues surrounding transmission lines. Ever single reader of cutting-edge publications like the Weekly World News (famous for Bat Boy pictures) "knows" that the radiation from electric power lines causes impotence, cancer, autism and a host of other bad things. So, it is the duty of ever Weekly World News reader to protest any proposed transmission line construction in their area because otherwise their flowers won't grow.
End result of this is that it is almost impossible to build a new transmission line except in the middle of nowhere. So any idea you might have of seeing HVDC cryogenic superconducting transmission lines in your area is a complete fantasy - they can never be built. The protests will be too strong. It will be thousands of soccer moms thinking you want to kill their children.
Absolutely, what is needed is a ebook reader with a 24" display so it can handle really big page sizes. Right?
Please put down what you are smoking. When your chemically-fogged brain has cleared you will understand that an ebook reader is designed to be able to be held in one hand and the text read easily. Neither of these happen with larger screen sizes, as can easily be seen by the sales numbers for te Kindle and Kindle DX - the DX doesn't sell very well because very few people want the huge form factor. Also, I haven't seen any other ebook readers other than the DX which have anything like that form factor.
PDF is a rotten format for ebooks and it isn't ever going to get any better for them, nor them for it. What makes sense for a printed page layout doesn't make any sense at all for a variety of devices with varying screen sizes and resolutions. Navigating around a page makes little sense when what you want is the text in an accessible form for the device you are using. While it is possible to achieve this with PDF, it isn't simple or convenient.
What MFC was all about was hiding the nasty parts of writing applications for Windows inside of a framework that was supposed to make everything nice and orthogonal. For the most part, it failed in this task because you had to understand the underlying SDK-level API in order to make effective use of MFC.
ActiveX was the next round of this and ATL was again supposed to hide things from the developer. It didn't do this, although it did make COM much simpler for a lot of the world. And Microsoft seemed to want to make COM into the "new" API for Windows without having it support any of the nasty parts.
C# and VB.NET were the mostly the next round of this with COM as the primary path to getting anything done at all. If you like COM (or are forced into it), then C# and VB.NET make a lot of sense because now COM isn't some add-on to C or a template library that is 90% implemented - it is 100% there. But again, if you don't understand how Windows is doing things for you through the COM API functionality you will never understand why things are working the way they are.
Yes, they added an entirely new GUI definition package and a whole lot of things as new COM interfaces to things that didn't have them before. The idea was clearly to make it possible to write applications completely in the COM world without ever having to touch the "native" API. And for the most part this succeeded because finally enough effort was put into the framework that a large number of application developers could get along with only the interfaces supplied.
The problem with building an application framework ontop of a native API is that you can easily find yourself with a never-ending task if the native API keeps growing and changing, which it certainly has. Microsoft doesn't do well with never-ending tasks - priorities shift and where there were once hundreds of people working on something there might only be a few later on. Again, we have the MFC dilemma where you can write 90% of the application with MFC but that last 10% has to be done by someone familiar with both MFC and the native API. C# and VB.NET are mostly still better than that, but when you fall into a hole in the framework it takes someone familiar with three or four API levels, not just two as it was before.
Is the idea of a processor-independent CLR a good one? Maybe. If the idea of Windows on multiple processor families (like MIPS and PPC, for example) ever amounted to anything it would be very useful. With 99.9999 of the hardware out there being x86 and x64 (x86 compatible) there is little point to it today. Those directions are very difficult to see and I suspect Microsoft was committed to the CLR approach long before the decision was made to abandon MIPS and PPC, as well as nearly every other hardware architecture other than x86/x64. This might change again in the future, but without huge memory and processor availability it is unlikely that much cross-platform application compatibility will really exist. It makes no sense to have a cross-platform application that relies on so much memory that it won't run on handheld devices when the choices are x86 desktops and other handheld devices only. The future of a non-x86 compatible desktop at this point is very much in question, probably to the point of it taking another 10 or 20 years before there is a real change there.
Back in the 1970s IBM mainframe customers pretty much made certain that nothing that wasn't compatible with the 370 instruction set would sell, and we are living with that legacy today, still, 30+ years later. Somewhere around 1995 or so it was pretty plain that the market for non-x86 compatible hardware in the PC world was limited and perhaps non-existant. Alpha was still produced and Windows NT came out with MIPS, Alpha and PPC support. But the number of real applications that were ever ported to non-x86 platforms was exceedingly small. Not saying it couldn't possibly happen, but at this point the need to break away from x86/x64 is vanishingly small and betting
The current thinking among most people in the US is that the government needs to provide jobs for the 30+ million people officially unemployed and probably the other 60+ million that are "underemployed" or stealthy unemployed. We are currently at around 46% of the people in the US being dependent on the government for their "alternative income" - this isn't government jobs but government handouts.
All that is needed is to move this 46% to more like 60% and the country will be finally reshaped the way some people would like it. No more "corporations" or abusive private industry. Heck, probably no more "private" anything. The government will be the employer and if you aren't working directly for the government, you are working for a supplier that sells everything to the government. No need for unemployment anymore, because everyone has a job. No need for private health care either - we're all government employees.
This has nothing to do with "empire" and "empire building" and everything to do with the future of the people of this planet. The USSR collapsed partly because the people finally figured out they could not depend on the government to fulfill its promises to take care of everyone, permanently. The people in the US didn't get that message and we are well down the road to being completely reliant on government to take care of everything.
With 60% or more of the people depending on the government for their income, their housing, their food and their healthcare we will finally see some folks voted into office that promise to take care of everyone, permanently. Why wouldn't everyone vote for that plan? If it means kicking out all the rich people and rich corporations so the "regular people" can just live in peace and be taken care of, so what?
Google's data was undoubtably for sale in certain circles and may still be. Why would anyone buy this information? Simple - it gives you about a 95% (or better) database that describes in geographic terms the market penetration of specific brands and models of WiFi routers.
How much would DLink pay to find out specific zip codes that had more Belkin routers than anything else? How about zip codes in affluent areas where NetGear low-end models are more common? The amount of analysis one can do with this after translating the MAC address to a manufacturer and model is just incredible.
Microsoft releasing this publiclly would obviously undermine the price of the Google data. Google spent millions gathering it and defending their collection and distribution of this data, maybe tens of millions. If Microsoft just zeroed the value of the data it would be quite a coup.
Holding back cheap electric power makes tremendous sense in some circles.
Think about it for a moment. If electricity was limited and there was only enough for a few lights at home and the refrigerator we wouldn't have to worry about coal pollution, coal mining, light pollution (no more streetlights!) or many of the problems we face today. There would probably be less electricity for commercial purposes, so instead of using a computer there would be 10-20 clerks with mechanical calculators. Full employment once again!
Most of the pollution would be gone in a decade or two. You wouldn't drive a car if the gas pump had to be hand cranked and there were no traffic lights, just policemen on every corner directing traffic. There would be more horses and plenty of work for people cleaning up after them. People wouldn't have cell phones because the solar cell chargers would be for TVs, radios and lights in the evenings. Going on a cruise might be really nice because they would have lights and games 24x7.
Just think what Las Vegas would be like by candlelight and gas lamps.
Sorry, but humans existed for a long, long time without electric power and we can learn to exist again in an environment where there is only a little electricity available.
The US is certainly headed in that direction. You can expect to start seeing the power companies using the tools homeowners are giving them to turn off appliances, air conditioning and just about everything else during the day and at other peak times. For the rest, you can expect to see time-dependent electric rates when it becomes idiotic to try to be running anything more than a 7-watt CFL bulb in your house at some times.
More capacity will not be built. The war on utilities has pretty much been won by the environmentalists so today even if the federal government declared instant approval without any possibility of court hearings, environmental impact studies and endless negotiations over land use it would take at least five years before new capacity came on line. We don't have five years of reserve capacity left and if we turn off the nuclear power plants (likely!) we will be in an instant capacity crisis.
It will be a choice between the home refrigerator running during the day or the computer at the office. It will be a choice between being able to work late in the evening or other people watching TV, cooking and cleaning their homes.
Sure, it will be difficult for some and likely mean the end of home air conditioning in much of the US. But we've only had air conditioning since the 1930s. Lots of old folks will likely die from heat stroke and such, but they wouldn't have lived anyway before the 1930s. But the important thing to remember is that recognizable humans has been around for 40,000 years or more and nobody had air conditioning or electric light except in the last 100 years or so.
If you hang around people with serious gambling addictions you would know that this isn't just some corporate tax dodge. If you have proper documentation about gambling wins and losses you, and individual, can deduct your gambling losses.
This means that if you drop $50,000 at the craps table one night you can indeed deduct that against your $100,000 winnings the next night. I do not believe gambling losses can offset any non-gambling income.
Of course, you need to have all of this properly documented. It generally isn't all that hard to sort out how much you leave at the casino, though. Proving it make take some work with an accountant, however.
Today there are 10 qualified people applying for every job that is out there. Virtually any attempt to get the hiring company to spend money on a lawyer to hire you when the other 9 aren't as picky will result in no negotiation on the part of the company. This is especially true if you come in with attitude.
On the other side, if you think you need a lawyer to explain an NDA/Non-compete document to you, it is the wrong company to be working for. If the document isn't 100% clear the company is either (a) trying to hide something or (b) completely taken over by lawyers. In the latter case, trying to get anyone in management to agree to anything (like buying a different brand of pen) will require meetings between the board and the legal team. Forget it. Move along.
Most of the HR history of "owning everything you do" comes from a relatively few cases where either the employer or the employee was incredibly abusive of the relationship. The result is now a company can either up front say they need to own everything (unless they specifically release it to you) or they can fight it out in court later. Nobody wants to fight about anything in court, so the short path is to up front say they are going to own everything. Again, many companies will specifically release things to the employee if it is appropriate to do so.
How about a day, announced a month or so in advance, where all nuclear power plants in the US are simply turned off? For 24 hours.
How about delivering a 50lb sack of coal ash to every single household in the US the day after, so they can see what the result of coal-fired power plants really is? It would need to include a full-color brochure listing all of the toxic substances that come out of the chimney from a coal plant as well.
If we did these things there might be less opposition to dealing with nuclear waste. Oh, and how about some PSAs showing a huge mountain of materials saying that nobody could go near this for 10,000 years and then show the small trash can that shows what is left after reprocessing.
Instead of doing any of these things we are allowing the pseudo-environmental movement to control the discussion to the point where we will be shutting down nuclear plants in the US, we will be shutting down coal plants in the US and we will have a new electrical system whereby there is power during the day and nothing at night. If you are rich and can afford 100KWh of batteries, you might have lights and TV at night. Maybe, until someone passes some regulations saying that it is discriminatory and unfair.
The US is clearly headed down the path of unreliable electric power with limited capacity. How will this affect future generations? Well, you can bet that computers in the home will not be a big deal in the future - unless they run on batteries that are charged up during the day.
Well, over the next 7 months I received a grand total of almost $1,750 in charges spread across 5 different bills. (Doctor's bill, x-ray technician's bill, clinic bill, a bill from the parent organization, etc.) The most egregious was a $460 "facility use fee," which, after much calling and bitching, was finally dropped. Apparently it was incurred simply by walking in the door.
You didn't pay it I hope. You see, the hospital inflates the charges for every little thing to pass along to someone that can pay the bills for all the people that aren't paying. Medicaid pays maybe 15% of the bill. Medicare is about the same. If you have insurance they pay maybe 50% of the billed rate.
If you tell the hospital that you aren't paying, they turn you over to a collection agency and woe be upon you.
However, if you tell the hospital you would really like to pay but you are having trouble with it they will (a) cut the bill down and (b) offer you a payment plan. You end up paying maybe 50% of the original bill over five or ten years. And if you stop paying they pretty much just write it off.
The people that do not understand how this works and feel they are being forced to pay are indeed paying for the rest of us that aren't paying.
Today the rule is cost shifting. If you have insurance you are being billed for other people that do not have insurance. Most of the time this is buried in the paperwork and is simply increased item cost. Of course, they are going to scramble around some stuff as well so you have charges from other people appearing on your bill.
Also, because the Medicaid and Medicare rates are absurdly low, like 15 cents to the dollar, the charges for all of those people are bundled in with anyone with insurance.
This is why the idea of someone not going to a hospital because they do not have insurance is silly. They think they will run up horrible bills and be beholden to the hospital forever because of these huge bills. Or, they go and declare bankruptcy because they are so afraid of the bills and the collections that might come someday.
Yes, it is like someone buying a house and looking at what they are going to pay over 30 years saying "I can't afford that" when in truth these days it is highly unlikely they will even be in the same city in 10 years.
The truth is the hospital needs money but if you don't have it they will just get it from someone that does.
Isn't there a new browser option to eliminate the address bar entirely, specifically for people that can't type URLs? After all, if all you do is use Google and bookmarks, what possible use is the address bar?
We're not talking about taking tax money and spending it in the US, we're talking about taking tax money and spending it on paying off China so they keep lending us money so we can become even more indebited to them.
Right now, China (and perhaps the Saudis) are financing $0.46 of every dollar the US government spends. When it creeps past $0.50 we might very well see someone from China sitting down with the President and Congress to decide how the money coming from China is going be spent - after all, they will pretty much own over 50% of the budget. Does this really sound like a good idea?
Sure, raising taxes would be great. We should also consider a "wealth tax" not just a income taxes. Right now, the folks making the most money aren't receiving it as a salary subject to income taxes but they are getting it as capital gains which is taxed at a much lower, fixed rate. That means that an income tax increase isn't going to affect capital gains income at all and would therefore be totally non-productive. I really want to see someone proposing that it should be illegal to have more than a couple of million dollars and the government should just take it all. That would really fix the economy, now wouldn't it? Make the US the home of poor people once again. Eliminate wealth in the US and give it all to the government to spend.
So how come Obama hasn't pushed any of his WPA-like programs that he was talking about during his campaign? Instead of spending over $200,000 per job with his stimulus program, how about some real government-paid jobs for millions of people? Fix unemployment by hiring people, not paying four times as much to someone else to hire someone.
Come on, if what we want is a real government-sponsored economy where the government actually supports people, then bring it on! Let's see it happen and see the results.
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At some point you have to realize that there simply is no need for at least half of the population in the US isn't needed for any sort of labor. In the last 50 years or so we have gone from an economy where everyone that could work had a job waiting for them to an economy where now there simply are no jobs available. Automation and improved processes have eliminated the need, as have the complete removal of most manufacturing from the US.
The idea seems to be that everyone that used to work in a factory can now be retrained to be a "knowledge worker" or some such. There are a couple of problems with that idea so it really isn't going to work out that way, but no matter what, there simply aren't any job openings. The end result is that the US as a country can either push the unemployed to the street or the government can support them. Maybe with make-work jobs (one group digs holes, the next group fills them in), maybe with just a check so they can sit at home and watch the Home Shopping Channel.
Exactly the same feelings that the majority of people had in Moscow when the Czar's troops started firing on rioters in the streets.
Sorry, but this is the new way of dealing with political differences in democratic countries. There are no us vs. them because if you aren't on the rioter's side then you are part of the oppressing government. Everyone. There are no innocent bystanders.
In a democratic country, there is no distinction between government officials and "fellow citizens".
All "fellow citizens" that do not agree with your political stand are indeed oppressing you. They are clearly part of the problem until your beliefs have made it to the majority. All you can do is make it so that your position becomes the majority, and until it does, pretty much anything goes.
The idea that you should respect others, not damage property, etc. etc. etc. is a utterly outmoded position and holds no sway with current political activists. We are going to see this happen in the US, probably right after the next election because no matter who wins, they are not going to be able to fix the economic problems we have gotten ourselves in. We have been voting for largess from the government for a long time now and the bill is finally coming due - unfortunately, we aren't able to pay it. We can mortgage our future as long as someone is willing to buy it, but even that is becoming somewhat in doubt.
What's left? Rioting, burning buildings, killing people that don't agree with you. Futile as it may be, at least it makes people feel better about things. For a little while.
What you are trying to describe here is something called abstract symbol manipulation. Some people can do it, others cannot.
The problem for people conceptually is that you are dealing with manipulating object Q through a symbolic relationship with object X. Even when both objects are real-world things the abstraction of the relationship between X and Q stymies some people. They don't get it, they don't understand the relationship and they are never going to. The same person that can't do this then can take a screwdriver and put something together that utterly frustrated someone else. The two abilities are not related in the slightest bit and this confuses people still further.
It is important to understand that this is not a learned ability. You either can do abstract symbol manipulation or you can't. You cannot teach it, you don't "get better at it with practice" and the people that cannot do it will never pick it up. Probably the best analogy is sort of a left-brain vs. right-brain kind of thing. There is no doubt that there is a physical manifestation to this in the brain.
What this means is that the RMSish idea that we should all be programmers and we can only truly be free by being programmers is utter hogwash. It also means that anyone beleiving that all we have to do is retrain assembly line workers and they can be "knowledge workers" in the new economy is barking up the wrong tree. Taking someone that is doing a good job at manipulating physical objects and assuming them to be able to be trained them to manipulate symbolic objects is in for a surprise. As I suspect a great number of people in the adult education field have found and not bothered to tell too many people.
Jerry Pournelle has touched on this subject some in his non-fiction writings and it is worth digging out as much as you possibly can about this. If people do not understand this - people in education, people in business and people in goverment - we are going to see some very tough times ahead. From everything I have seen, people do not understand this at all and most people in education, business and government think it is just a matter of training. They are wrong.
We aren't talking about people that are disabled in any sense, but if we don't correct people's impressions of this and how it is immutable we are going to build a society where these people truly are disabled.
Gosh, if this is true, how come you haven't heard about it? Because it is rather subtle and it certainly imparts a certain class separation which people do not like.
The next question is the really hard one. If some significant percentage of people simply cannot become "knowledge workers" or "abstract symbol manipulators" in the new economy and all the factory jobs disappear, just exactly what are these people supposed to do? If the mission is to send everyone through college so they can learn to use computers to manipulate abstract symbols, what happens to the people that can't?
The motivation to clone is that it is cheaper and less risky. Someone else has already done the research and they have already tested the marketplace. Therefore, the cloner has a much better chance of success and can probably introduce a product at a lower price.
Obviously, if there were no impedements to this we would have only cloners and nobody doing anything except copying what someone else has already introduced. I can't imagine any company approving spending money on something "new" when they could back something "proven" instead. New would be clearly associated with risk and the possiblity of coming out with a real loser, whereas simply cloning what is already a success ensures success.
The point is that today if such things were eliminated, Apple would be out of business in a month. Why wouldn't some company in China simply reproduce the iPad, iPhone, iXYZ, whatever for half the price? And, considering it cost them a tenth of the manufacturing cost (using 100% slave laber as opposed to Foxconn using people that are only 3/4th slaves), it would be extremely profitable.
For a month. Until someone else copied it yet again.
I'm really not sure why we aren't seeing a flood of iPad clones in the US. Some of them with backwards Apple logos on them and the like. The only thing I can imagine is that with the hardware and firmware copied such devices are blocked from connecting to iTunes meaning the cloners would have to (very expensively) set up their own servers and such.
Is being offered a $200 fine in exchange for a court hearing for a traffic ticket "extortion"? How about $500? You build up enough precedent and it just might be.
I would think there would be no bar against a much wider applicability of this sort of decision and pushing things along the line of saying that settlements and fines in exchange for opting out of a legal proceeding in court are all extortionate.
This sort of thing didn't use to exist at all. You filed suit against someone and their were no real options other than proceeding. Similarly, no prosecutor before maybe 1950 would ever offer a defendant an opportunity to just pay a big fine rather than go through a trial, even for a traffic ticket. If the ticket demanded a court appearance, that was what you got. And the cop had to show up and testify. Today, this mostly never happens - people just pay the fine and accept the extortion.
I can easily envision a legal environment where there is no possibility of pre-trial settlements. Both parties have to show up, personally - no lawyers without clients. Now this does have the effect of making a lawsuit of any kind start to get really, really expensive and painful. But maybe that is what is needed.
You misunderstand Walesian philosophy.
There is truth in large numbers and concensus. If you don't have concensus, then you don't have truth. So whatever you are writing if it isn't agreed with by the majority (or even the minority of powerful people in the Wiki world), you are wasting your time and theirs.
This is the logical outgrowth of much of the counter-culture movement beginning in the 1950s and it isn't going to disappear easily.
The reality is that well-researched material is difficult and time consuming. You can get maybe 50-60% of the material that makes up what an encyclopedia was in the 1980s from people with passion and dedication but after that you are faced with just a lot of work. Work for no compensation other than ego-boosting.
This reality has been utterly rejected by the Walesian philosphy of knowledge in which there is no real "truth" there is just concensus.
What they are left with is a whole bunch of stuff of unknown quality that people with various passions have written over the years. OK, admittedly some of it is accurate and good but there is no telling what. There is plenty that was written by someone with an agenda and Wikipedia made (and continues to make) it possible for someone with enough dedication to block anyone from corrupting their perfect treatise. Eventually, it is going to be left alone even if the original contributor departs.
The amount of passion that is out there for people to spend time writing and defending their turf in the Wikipedia world just isn't enough for the whole thing to work consistently for a long period of time. Sure, there might be a base of the truly hardcore, but it isn't enough. They seem to have some kind of rating now so people can continue to tune the text according to concensus, but concensus isn't important except in that Walesian dimension. As someone pointed out earlier what you tend to get with enforced concensus is the million-monkeys effect. While it is entirely possible you can get another Shakespear you absolutely will get a lot of drivel. What concensus does is form that drivel according to social norms so it isn't recognized. It is still nothing but the regurgitated ramblings of pop culture.
How do you fix this? Well, I don't think it is possible. Walesian philosophy says that in large numbers there is truth and all truths are equal. With that in mind, what possible hope does a real subject matter expert have? Sure, there might be a few with real passion to tell the world their views on genetics, high energy particle physics or the social orders in ancient Egypt. But they chances they are going to win out over the concensus belief system are small indeed. It was an interesting experiment and it isn't entirely surprising that it lasted as long as it has. But passions move on and Jimmy is unlikely to find much passion out there filling in the cracks in what has been built or taking over what has been abandoned.
Today there is some excess capacity that can be transferred between states. An example is a goodly part of California is run from the Palo Verde nuclear plant outside Phoenix. It isn't practical today to build a power plant in California, so they take what they can get from Arizona.
This is coming to an end real soon. Arizona does not have infinite capacity to supply California. As demand in Arizona grows less and less will be available for California. The result will be that stuff starts getting turned off in homes during the day to keep the offices powered, and vice-versa in the evenings. Sure, there will likely be plenty of capacity available at night - but if you want to run something that takes as much power as the home air conditioner you may want to think about turning the air conditioner off while you are doing it.
The US hasn't built a major power plant since some time in the 1970s from what I understand. We have built thousands of "peeker plants" which are natural gas fired and the intent was that these would only be turned on to support the grid in periods of high demand.
They are all or almost all running 24x7 today.
Can't build a power plant without community agreement and you aren't going to get that. Nobody wants a power plant in their backyard and the current government regulations require community input and lots of environment impact studies. The end result is no more power plants and no new transmission lines.
The US could probably use 100 2000GW plants right now, for both new capacity and replacing obsolete coal-fired plants. They are not being built, not scheduled to be built and anywhere past a licensing stage.
We are on the ragged edge of capacity on the generation side, but there is currently enough to go around most of the time. People are going to have remote-cutoff controls put on air conditioning and other high-use devices soon, but the overall impact should be small. Unless of course there is continued growth in demand. Since the native US population is shrinking you would think this wouldn't be a problem. Except every new immigrant (legal or illegal) is another 10-20 KWh on the grid and we are getting 100,000 of them a year.
Yes, transmission is a problem, but the problem is made much worse because of the social issues surrounding transmission lines. Ever single reader of cutting-edge publications like the Weekly World News (famous for Bat Boy pictures) "knows" that the radiation from electric power lines causes impotence, cancer, autism and a host of other bad things. So, it is the duty of ever Weekly World News reader to protest any proposed transmission line construction in their area because otherwise their flowers won't grow.
End result of this is that it is almost impossible to build a new transmission line except in the middle of nowhere. So any idea you might have of seeing HVDC cryogenic superconducting transmission lines in your area is a complete fantasy - they can never be built. The protests will be too strong. It will be thousands of soccer moms thinking you want to kill their children.
Absolutely, what is needed is a ebook reader with a 24" display so it can handle really big page sizes. Right?
Please put down what you are smoking. When your chemically-fogged brain has cleared you will understand that an ebook reader is designed to be able to be held in one hand and the text read easily. Neither of these happen with larger screen sizes, as can easily be seen by the sales numbers for te Kindle and Kindle DX - the DX doesn't sell very well because very few people want the huge form factor. Also, I haven't seen any other ebook readers other than the DX which have anything like that form factor.
PDF is a rotten format for ebooks and it isn't ever going to get any better for them, nor them for it. What makes sense for a printed page layout doesn't make any sense at all for a variety of devices with varying screen sizes and resolutions. Navigating around a page makes little sense when what you want is the text in an accessible form for the device you are using. While it is possible to achieve this with PDF, it isn't simple or convenient.
What MFC was all about was hiding the nasty parts of writing applications for Windows inside of a framework that was supposed to make everything nice and orthogonal. For the most part, it failed in this task because you had to understand the underlying SDK-level API in order to make effective use of MFC.
ActiveX was the next round of this and ATL was again supposed to hide things from the developer. It didn't do this, although it did make COM much simpler for a lot of the world. And Microsoft seemed to want to make COM into the "new" API for Windows without having it support any of the nasty parts.
C# and VB.NET were the mostly the next round of this with COM as the primary path to getting anything done at all. If you like COM (or are forced into it), then C# and VB.NET make a lot of sense because now COM isn't some add-on to C or a template library that is 90% implemented - it is 100% there. But again, if you don't understand how Windows is doing things for you through the COM API functionality you will never understand why things are working the way they are.
Yes, they added an entirely new GUI definition package and a whole lot of things as new COM interfaces to things that didn't have them before. The idea was clearly to make it possible to write applications completely in the COM world without ever having to touch the "native" API. And for the most part this succeeded because finally enough effort was put into the framework that a large number of application developers could get along with only the interfaces supplied.
The problem with building an application framework ontop of a native API is that you can easily find yourself with a never-ending task if the native API keeps growing and changing, which it certainly has. Microsoft doesn't do well with never-ending tasks - priorities shift and where there were once hundreds of people working on something there might only be a few later on. Again, we have the MFC dilemma where you can write 90% of the application with MFC but that last 10% has to be done by someone familiar with both MFC and the native API. C# and VB.NET are mostly still better than that, but when you fall into a hole in the framework it takes someone familiar with three or four API levels, not just two as it was before.
Is the idea of a processor-independent CLR a good one? Maybe. If the idea of Windows on multiple processor families (like MIPS and PPC, for example) ever amounted to anything it would be very useful. With 99.9999 of the hardware out there being x86 and x64 (x86 compatible) there is little point to it today. Those directions are very difficult to see and I suspect Microsoft was committed to the CLR approach long before the decision was made to abandon MIPS and PPC, as well as nearly every other hardware architecture other than x86/x64. This might change again in the future, but without huge memory and processor availability it is unlikely that much cross-platform application compatibility will really exist. It makes no sense to have a cross-platform application that relies on so much memory that it won't run on handheld devices when the choices are x86 desktops and other handheld devices only. The future of a non-x86 compatible desktop at this point is very much in question, probably to the point of it taking another 10 or 20 years before there is a real change there.
Back in the 1970s IBM mainframe customers pretty much made certain that nothing that wasn't compatible with the 370 instruction set would sell, and we are living with that legacy today, still, 30+ years later. Somewhere around 1995 or so it was pretty plain that the market for non-x86 compatible hardware in the PC world was limited and perhaps non-existant. Alpha was still produced and Windows NT came out with MIPS, Alpha and PPC support. But the number of real applications that were ever ported to non-x86 platforms was exceedingly small. Not saying it couldn't possibly happen, but at this point the need to break away from x86/x64 is vanishingly small and betting
The current thinking among most people in the US is that the government needs to provide jobs for the 30+ million people officially unemployed and probably the other 60+ million that are "underemployed" or stealthy unemployed. We are currently at around 46% of the people in the US being dependent on the government for their "alternative income" - this isn't government jobs but government handouts.
All that is needed is to move this 46% to more like 60% and the country will be finally reshaped the way some people would like it. No more "corporations" or abusive private industry. Heck, probably no more "private" anything. The government will be the employer and if you aren't working directly for the government, you are working for a supplier that sells everything to the government. No need for unemployment anymore, because everyone has a job. No need for private health care either - we're all government employees.
This has nothing to do with "empire" and "empire building" and everything to do with the future of the people of this planet. The USSR collapsed partly because the people finally figured out they could not depend on the government to fulfill its promises to take care of everyone, permanently. The people in the US didn't get that message and we are well down the road to being completely reliant on government to take care of everything.
With 60% or more of the people depending on the government for their income, their housing, their food and their healthcare we will finally see some folks voted into office that promise to take care of everyone, permanently. Why wouldn't everyone vote for that plan? If it means kicking out all the rich people and rich corporations so the "regular people" can just live in peace and be taken care of, so what?
Google's data was undoubtably for sale in certain circles and may still be. Why would anyone buy this information? Simple - it gives you about a 95% (or better) database that describes in geographic terms the market penetration of specific brands and models of WiFi routers.
How much would DLink pay to find out specific zip codes that had more Belkin routers than anything else? How about zip codes in affluent areas where NetGear low-end models are more common? The amount of analysis one can do with this after translating the MAC address to a manufacturer and model is just incredible.
Microsoft releasing this publiclly would obviously undermine the price of the Google data. Google spent millions gathering it and defending their collection and distribution of this data, maybe tens of millions. If Microsoft just zeroed the value of the data it would be quite a coup.
Holding back cheap electric power makes tremendous sense in some circles.
Think about it for a moment. If electricity was limited and there was only enough for a few lights at home and the refrigerator we wouldn't have to worry about coal pollution, coal mining, light pollution (no more streetlights!) or many of the problems we face today. There would probably be less electricity for commercial purposes, so instead of using a computer there would be 10-20 clerks with mechanical calculators. Full employment once again!
Most of the pollution would be gone in a decade or two. You wouldn't drive a car if the gas pump had to be hand cranked and there were no traffic lights, just policemen on every corner directing traffic. There would be more horses and plenty of work for people cleaning up after them. People wouldn't have cell phones because the solar cell chargers would be for TVs, radios and lights in the evenings. Going on a cruise might be really nice because they would have lights and games 24x7.
Just think what Las Vegas would be like by candlelight and gas lamps.
Sorry, but humans existed for a long, long time without electric power and we can learn to exist again in an environment where there is only a little electricity available.
The US is certainly headed in that direction. You can expect to start seeing the power companies using the tools homeowners are giving them to turn off appliances, air conditioning and just about everything else during the day and at other peak times. For the rest, you can expect to see time-dependent electric rates when it becomes idiotic to try to be running anything more than a 7-watt CFL bulb in your house at some times.
More capacity will not be built. The war on utilities has pretty much been won by the environmentalists so today even if the federal government declared instant approval without any possibility of court hearings, environmental impact studies and endless negotiations over land use it would take at least five years before new capacity came on line. We don't have five years of reserve capacity left and if we turn off the nuclear power plants (likely!) we will be in an instant capacity crisis.
It will be a choice between the home refrigerator running during the day or the computer at the office. It will be a choice between being able to work late in the evening or other people watching TV, cooking and cleaning their homes.
Sure, it will be difficult for some and likely mean the end of home air conditioning in much of the US. But we've only had air conditioning since the 1930s. Lots of old folks will likely die from heat stroke and such, but they wouldn't have lived anyway before the 1930s. But the important thing to remember is that recognizable humans has been around for 40,000 years or more and nobody had air conditioning or electric light except in the last 100 years or so.
If you hang around people with serious gambling addictions you would know that this isn't just some corporate tax dodge. If you have proper documentation about gambling wins and losses you, and individual, can deduct your gambling losses.
This means that if you drop $50,000 at the craps table one night you can indeed deduct that against your $100,000 winnings the next night. I do not believe gambling losses can offset any non-gambling income.
Of course, you need to have all of this properly documented. It generally isn't all that hard to sort out how much you leave at the casino, though. Proving it make take some work with an accountant, however.
Today there are 10 qualified people applying for every job that is out there. Virtually any attempt to get the hiring company to spend money on a lawyer to hire you when the other 9 aren't as picky will result in no negotiation on the part of the company. This is especially true if you come in with attitude.
On the other side, if you think you need a lawyer to explain an NDA/Non-compete document to you, it is the wrong company to be working for. If the document isn't 100% clear the company is either (a) trying to hide something or (b) completely taken over by lawyers. In the latter case, trying to get anyone in management to agree to anything (like buying a different brand of pen) will require meetings between the board and the legal team. Forget it. Move along.
Most of the HR history of "owning everything you do" comes from a relatively few cases where either the employer or the employee was incredibly abusive of the relationship. The result is now a company can either up front say they need to own everything (unless they specifically release it to you) or they can fight it out in court later. Nobody wants to fight about anything in court, so the short path is to up front say they are going to own everything. Again, many companies will specifically release things to the employee if it is appropriate to do so.
How about a day, announced a month or so in advance, where all nuclear power plants in the US are simply turned off? For 24 hours.
How about delivering a 50lb sack of coal ash to every single household in the US the day after, so they can see what the result of coal-fired power plants really is? It would need to include a full-color brochure listing all of the toxic substances that come out of the chimney from a coal plant as well.
If we did these things there might be less opposition to dealing with nuclear waste. Oh, and how about some PSAs showing a huge mountain of materials saying that nobody could go near this for 10,000 years and then show the small trash can that shows what is left after reprocessing.
Instead of doing any of these things we are allowing the pseudo-environmental movement to control the discussion to the point where we will be shutting down nuclear plants in the US, we will be shutting down coal plants in the US and we will have a new electrical system whereby there is power during the day and nothing at night. If you are rich and can afford 100KWh of batteries, you might have lights and TV at night. Maybe, until someone passes some regulations saying that it is discriminatory and unfair.
The US is clearly headed down the path of unreliable electric power with limited capacity. How will this affect future generations? Well, you can bet that computers in the home will not be a big deal in the future - unless they run on batteries that are charged up during the day.
Well, over the next 7 months I received a grand total of almost $1,750 in charges spread across 5 different bills. (Doctor's bill, x-ray technician's bill, clinic bill, a bill from the parent organization, etc.) The most egregious was a $460 "facility use fee," which, after much calling and bitching, was finally dropped. Apparently it was incurred simply by walking in the door.
You didn't pay it I hope. You see, the hospital inflates the charges for every little thing to pass along to someone that can pay the bills for all the people that aren't paying. Medicaid pays maybe 15% of the bill. Medicare is about the same. If you have insurance they pay maybe 50% of the billed rate.
If you tell the hospital that you aren't paying, they turn you over to a collection agency and woe be upon you.
However, if you tell the hospital you would really like to pay but you are having trouble with it they will (a) cut the bill down and (b) offer you a payment plan. You end up paying maybe 50% of the original bill over five or ten years. And if you stop paying they pretty much just write it off.
The people that do not understand how this works and feel they are being forced to pay are indeed paying for the rest of us that aren't paying.
Today the rule is cost shifting. If you have insurance you are being billed for other people that do not have insurance. Most of the time this is buried in the paperwork and is simply increased item cost. Of course, they are going to scramble around some stuff as well so you have charges from other people appearing on your bill.
Also, because the Medicaid and Medicare rates are absurdly low, like 15 cents to the dollar, the charges for all of those people are bundled in with anyone with insurance.
This is why the idea of someone not going to a hospital because they do not have insurance is silly. They think they will run up horrible bills and be beholden to the hospital forever because of these huge bills. Or, they go and declare bankruptcy because they are so afraid of the bills and the collections that might come someday.
Yes, it is like someone buying a house and looking at what they are going to pay over 30 years saying "I can't afford that" when in truth these days it is highly unlikely they will even be in the same city in 10 years.
The truth is the hospital needs money but if you don't have it they will just get it from someone that does.
Isn't there a new browser option to eliminate the address bar entirely, specifically for people that can't type URLs? After all, if all you do is use Google and bookmarks, what possible use is the address bar?
We're not talking about taking tax money and spending it in the US, we're talking about taking tax money and spending it on paying off China so they keep lending us money so we can become even more indebited to them.
Right now, China (and perhaps the Saudis) are financing $0.46 of every dollar the US government spends. When it creeps past $0.50 we might very well see someone from China sitting down with the President and Congress to decide how the money coming from China is going be spent - after all, they will pretty much own over 50% of the budget. Does this really sound like a good idea?
Sure, raising taxes would be great. We should also consider a "wealth tax" not just a income taxes. Right now, the folks making the most money aren't receiving it as a salary subject to income taxes but they are getting it as capital gains which is taxed at a much lower, fixed rate. That means that an income tax increase isn't going to affect capital gains income at all and would therefore be totally non-productive. I really want to see someone proposing that it should be illegal to have more than a couple of million dollars and the government should just take it all. That would really fix the economy, now wouldn't it? Make the US the home of poor people once again. Eliminate wealth in the US and give it all to the government to spend.
So how come Obama hasn't pushed any of his WPA-like programs that he was talking about during his campaign? Instead of spending over $200,000 per job with his stimulus program, how about some real government-paid jobs for millions of people? Fix unemployment by hiring people, not paying four times as much to someone else to hire someone.
Come on, if what we want is a real government-sponsored economy where the government actually supports people, then bring it on! Let's see it happen and see the results.