But again, it's not confined to the public sector. I saw what you're describing at a power utility - it was well understood that if you worked to supply lucrative business to the outside contractors for 5 - 10 years, then you would be given a cushy job with one of them, but if you allowed the boat to be rocked, you'd be out of the club. Nobody really cares if the projects succeed or fail, as long as truckloads of the (customer's/investor's/taxpayer's) money gets redirected to a holding area where you might personally be able to go pick some of it up later. The only people who get upset are the poor, frustrated fools whose ego demands meaningful accomplishments in a work-related field. Oh, and the honest people, but in this sort of environment the honest people usually departed the scene years or even decades ago.
This happens at power and telecom utilities, financial and insurance institutions, academic and government centers, manufacturing plants, car dealerships - basically anywhere you have people and money.
Start small and tack things on works for some projects, but not for others. Specifically for FAA ATC, if you get a detail wrong then maybe a couple hundred people die. It's really kind of important to know that the whole thing works, all at once, from the first day.
If it were true that private sector competition was a tonic against bureacratic inefficiency, then companies like IBM, GM, financial institutions, and insurance companies would not be large, ponderous bureacracies. Yet they are.
The revolving door insourcing/outsourcing of IT has happened at many private companies, even mid-sized ones that should be small enough to figure out how to do better. Perot Systems and EDS have been involved in a number of these types of situations. If anything, in the current market government customers are less likely to be taken in because they've been fleeced so thoroughly in recent years already.
Well, not quite. The Bank of Fooblitzky has no idea how to evaluate open source projects, even to the point of knowing whether they exist or not. The Bank of Fooblitzky will choose someone to do the job the same way America chooses a President: 40% haircut, 55% smarm ability, and 5% superficial quality of resume.
Whoever gets chosen may, if they are smart, then decide to go look for subcontractors or employees who can actually code. But probably not. More likely, they'll be looking for employees who can do what they're told, which no amount of open source credentials will prove.
If you're trying to get hired as a kernel developer, then yes, you have to show a portfolio of previous kernel work, which you can only achieve by writing free software. But statistically, as a subset of the total population of working programmers, the number of kernel developers is there aren't any.
-Graham
Re:mainly because people are ignorant
on
Mars Rovers Update
·
· Score: 1
Oil was three times its current price in the 80s and nobody rioted then. There's actually a good argument to be made that higher oil prices would benefit the world economy. With oil prices depressed as they are today, the rich and energy-hungry industrialized nations get a free pass at the expense of the poor but resource-laden third world. Increase oil prices, and you transfer more money to the people who need it.
Or at least, you transfer more money to violent warlords who live in the same towns as the people who need it. Either way, the impact to the industrialized world will be limited to a few 'fuel surcharges' when you ship a package or buy a plane ticket. (And of course this presents the airline industry with a desparately needed opportunity for profiteering.)
The real issue with the nuclear boogeyman is that people will continue to oppose building nuclear plants even as they watch first-hand while coal and oil mining strip the land for miles around.
How can you say there's no philosophical or ethical foundation for regulation of monopolies? There are hundreds of years of economic theory, spanning all the way back to Adam Smith!
I might as well ask you what the philosophical or ethical foundation is for capitalism in the first place. You can't provide a respectable answer without addressing the question of monopoly.
To summarize: In a competitive marketplace, the "invisible hand" sets prices in a way that automatically balances society's allocation of resources to exactly those goods and services that provide the greatest net benefit for all. This is the philosophical basis for wanting a free market. However, the term "free" in this sense means "free of influence by any participant." The assumption is that the market is so large, and every individual participant is so small, that no individual action can significantly control prices. If someone finds a way to influence prices, then the market stops operating correctly and the production of goods and services ceases to serve the needs of the overall society. Overall production of the goods or services being influenced will be too low - there will be not enough quantity at too high a price.
What's more, if someone finds a way to influence prices just a little bit, they can use that influence to out-compete anyone else in the relevant markets. This gives rise to a positive feedback loop - once a market becomes "slightly unfree" it will tend to become less and less free until it is fully captured by one entity. This is seen through declining production quantities accompanied by increasing prices, with one entity (or occasionally a cartel) accumulating most or all of the resulting excess profits.
A capitalist society cannot allow this to happen. Understand this point. One way or another, any capitalist society *must* solve this problem, or collapse.
So how do you go about solving it? Several approaches have been tried over the years. One approach is price controls: Have the government observe market activity, and if prices appear to be moving outside the competitive range, step in and dictate prices directly. (Example: Rent controlled apartments in New York.) Another approach is to establish limits to the market share that sellers are permitted to capture. (Example: Recently debated U.S. legal limits to how many TV stations you can own.)
It is important to understand that both of these are technically better solutions than "trust-busting" because both of them take action early, while there is still a chance that society might be able to avoid feeling the effects of the problem. Anti-monopoly legislation is, very unfortunately, enforceable only after the fact. As a result, it has the flaws you describe. But you have it backwards: If what you do today is illegal even though it was legal yesterday, the flaw in the legislation is not that it prevents today's activity. The flaw is that it failed to prevent what you were doing yesterday.
So, where does this leave us? On the one hand, we have to accept that flawed trust-busting is a direct consequence of ideological opposition to better alternatives like price controls or regulation. On the other hand, we have to accept that this ideological opposition is not itself invalid. So what we need is a way to ensure the freedom of markets without invoking ponderous government intervention.
What we need is a GNU GPL for markets - a way of automatically, inescapably, and defensibly defending their freedom from the inevitable attacks. If you have any ideas along these lines, please post them.
1. People who don't have a boss, because they are the boss. 2. People who are a boss, but also have a boss. 3. People who work for living, and have a boss.
Usually, the term "manager" describes Type 2. These people can be fired by either Type 1 people, or bigger Type 2 people. Note that Type 1 people still have constraints on their ability to act; they may be overseen by a board of directors, or answerable to major customers - when I say they don't have a boss, I only mean that there is no individual person who tells them what to do.
Interestingly, Type 3 people can be evaluated on the merits of the contribution they actually make through their work (e.g. how many widgets they assembled or calls they took). Type 3 people are also protected by employment law. As a result, it is very difficult to fire a Type 3 person with a strong work record.
Type 2 people, who are exempted from most of the protections of employment law, are much easier to fire. This makes them very vulnerable to any Type 3 person who finds a way to talk directly to Type 1 people. No-one likes to be vulnerable, so Type 2 people spend a lot of energy finding ways to strengthen their positions.
There are two ways to do this. The first is to have technical skill beyond the capability of any Type 3 person. If the Type 2 person is very smart or competent, or started as a Type 3 person in the same field, this might come naturally. If not, then it can be simulated by manipulation of the methods of delivery for knowledge and training.
The second way is to create various kinds of barriers that prevent the undesired outcome. For example, many Type 2 people jealously guard access to the Type 1 people, to make sure that no Type 3 person could ever voice a negative opinion. Many Type 2 people also keep a file (perhaps a mental one) on all the Type 3 people in their circle, so that they can (a) undermine their credibility if they ever actually talk to the Type 1 people, and (b) justify firing them if they become too much of a threat.
Type 2 people who use the second method are referred to as "professional managers." Many of the current ills of society are frequently attributed to the rise of a professional management class, even though cluelessness at the higher ranks surely dates back at least to Roman times.
This is shipping now, and supports VST, RTAS and the Windows one nobody uses - MMC or MMT or whatever it is. The only thing standing between you and this is $329 per "virtual vocalist". Leon and Lola are shipping, with Miriam soon to come.
-Graham
Re:New idea for causing massive damage! :)
on
Clean Nuclear Launches?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
No one said that. In fact, when that question was asked, the answer was "Okay, so we have to build it strong enough so that can't happen." And they did - the WTC was capable of withstanding an impact by the largest jet transport that existed at the time of its construction.
In fact the WTC towers were capable of (mostly) surviving 9/11, if only there had been better fire retardants on the supporting columns - which had been recommended repeatedly, particularly after the 1993 attacks. Nobody said that was a worry for another day, either, they just didn't want to pay for it.
TV should be directly viewer-supported. There are some key problems with the ad-supported model from the point of view of a TV viewer.
Basically, any given viewer wants some particular shows to continue and get funded, and doesn't care one way or the other about the rest. Under the ad-supported model, all the viewer can do is watch the show. This (presumably, and indirectly) contributes to high ratings, which attract ad dollars, which means the show gets to stay on the air.
If viewers contributed dollars directly, then someone who really likes a show could contribute a larger sum. In a case like, oh, hmm, FIREFLY, any given fanatical viewer could easily take on the financial burden 10 or even 100 "typical" viewers.
If we're going to make a radical change to television, let's do something that allows viewers, not advertisers, to pick the shows that succeed.
The Simpsons, Futurama, Friends, Seinfeld and Frasier represent a generation of television that was compellingly watchable. Some of those shows are still soldiering on, some of them aren't. As they die off, they are being replaced by shows like Survivor, The Bachelor, American Idol and Fear Factor. Yes, there are a few decent shows still being produced, but they are being crowded out of the schedule. I haven't added up the numbers, but I would bet that in the 2000 - 2003 time period there were less than half as many great new shows as there were in 1996 - 1999.
What it boils down to is, the advertising market has crashed, so budgets for TV series production have disappeared. Reality shows are cheap to produce, and they pull in the numbers. So that's where TV has gone. If you like reality shows, this is a Golden Age. If you don't, welcome to the post-TV consciousness.
Regardless of your economic arrangement with the theater, you DO have a socially courteous obligation to your theater-mates. The fact that you choose not to recognize this is what leads me to believe you are a social lout. Perhaps you choose other ways to express your boorishness.
Read your previous post. It's all between the theater and you - your holy individualist libertarian CONTRACT does not extend to one whit of consideration regarding the other human beings with whom you will be sitting for two hours. Their investment is not of interest to you, and you don't care what they like or don't like. So you plonk yourself down in the best seat in the house, but you're still pissed off that you have to watch the insipid slide show. No doubt you would prefer if all those other people simply left it open in preparation for your arrival.
So far this is all pretty much verbatim from your own posts. It's not much of a leap to figure that you also don't care whether your actions interfere with other people's enjoyment of the movie.
Well, if you get the best seat in the house, then everyone else derives less value from their investment than you do. This is offset by the fact that they watch less of the insipid slide show, and gain additional time in their lives for other pursuits. Something to think about.
If you don't want to watch the insipid slide show, don't get there so early. The world won't come to an end if you don't sit in seventh row center.
For the most part I like the trailers. At least with movie trailers there's still some effort going into the production values, in distinct contrast to most TV ads. It bugs me when the trailers are badly mistargeted, though.
I agree with you on the cartoons. That was a great tradition, and it's sad that it was lost. What happened to cartoons, anyway? Were they not selling enough popcorn, or something?
I don't know if it was in Battlestar Galactica or not, but Darth Vader said it to Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back. Lando had betrayed Luke et. al. to Vader, in return for Vader's promise to hand them over for Lando's safekeeping. Of course Vader broke that promise, because it was patently dumb, and if this had been real life, Lando would have seen through it immediately. (The whole point of the affair is that Vader wants these people.) It's one of those cases where some writer came up with the line, and then severely bent all rational circumstance and characterization just to force a situation where the line would be appropriate.
But it was a good line. And if it were real life, they probably wouldn't have been on a floating city with weird dangling pipes in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
But again, it's not confined to the public sector. I saw what you're describing at a power utility - it was well understood that if you worked to supply lucrative business to the outside contractors for 5 - 10 years, then you would be given a cushy job with one of them, but if you allowed the boat to be rocked, you'd be out of the club. Nobody really cares if the projects succeed or fail, as long as truckloads of the (customer's/investor's/taxpayer's) money gets redirected to a holding area where you might personally be able to go pick some of it up later. The only people who get upset are the poor, frustrated fools whose ego demands meaningful accomplishments in a work-related field. Oh, and the honest people, but in this sort of environment the honest people usually departed the scene years or even decades ago.
This happens at power and telecom utilities, financial and insurance institutions, academic and government centers, manufacturing plants, car dealerships - basically anywhere you have people and money.
-Graham
Start small and tack things on works for some projects, but not for others. Specifically for FAA ATC, if you get a detail wrong then maybe a couple hundred people die. It's really kind of important to know that the whole thing works, all at once, from the first day.
-Graham
If it were true that private sector competition was a tonic against bureacratic inefficiency, then companies like IBM, GM, financial institutions, and insurance companies would not be large, ponderous bureacracies. Yet they are.
The revolving door insourcing/outsourcing of IT has happened at many private companies, even mid-sized ones that should be small enough to figure out how to do better. Perot Systems and EDS have been involved in a number of these types of situations. If anything, in the current market government customers are less likely to be taken in because they've been fleeced so thoroughly in recent years already.
-Graham
What is the blind spot people have about this?
Ben is Glory! Wake up people!
Anyway, check out Firebird. It's way ahead of Postgres on most counts.
-Graham
Well, not quite. The Bank of Fooblitzky has no idea how to evaluate open source projects, even to the point of knowing whether they exist or not. The Bank of Fooblitzky will choose someone to do the job the same way America chooses a President: 40% haircut, 55% smarm ability, and 5% superficial quality of resume.
Whoever gets chosen may, if they are smart, then decide to go look for subcontractors or employees who can actually code. But probably not. More likely, they'll be looking for employees who can do what they're told, which no amount of open source credentials will prove.
If you're trying to get hired as a kernel developer, then yes, you have to show a portfolio of previous kernel work, which you can only achieve by writing free software. But statistically, as a subset of the total population of working programmers, the number of kernel developers is there aren't any.
-Graham
Oil was three times its current price in the 80s and nobody rioted then. There's actually a good argument to be made that higher oil prices would benefit the world economy. With oil prices depressed as they are today, the rich and energy-hungry industrialized nations get a free pass at the expense of the poor but resource-laden third world. Increase oil prices, and you transfer more money to the people who need it.
Or at least, you transfer more money to violent warlords who live in the same towns as the people who need it. Either way, the impact to the industrialized world will be limited to a few 'fuel surcharges' when you ship a package or buy a plane ticket. (And of course this presents the airline industry with a desparately needed opportunity for profiteering.)
The real issue with the nuclear boogeyman is that people will continue to oppose building nuclear plants even as they watch first-hand while coal and oil mining strip the land for miles around.
How can you say there's no philosophical or ethical foundation for regulation of monopolies? There are hundreds of years of economic theory, spanning all the way back to Adam Smith!
I might as well ask you what the philosophical or ethical foundation is for capitalism in the first place. You can't provide a respectable answer without addressing the question of monopoly.
To summarize: In a competitive marketplace, the "invisible hand" sets prices in a way that automatically balances society's allocation of resources to exactly those goods and services that provide the greatest net benefit for all. This is the philosophical basis for wanting a free market. However, the term "free" in this sense means "free of influence by any participant." The assumption is that the market is so large, and every individual participant is so small, that no individual action can significantly control prices. If someone finds a way to influence prices, then the market stops operating correctly and the production of goods and services ceases to serve the needs of the overall society. Overall production of the goods or services being influenced will be too low - there will be not enough quantity at too high a price.
What's more, if someone finds a way to influence prices just a little bit, they can use that influence to out-compete anyone else in the relevant markets. This gives rise to a positive feedback loop - once a market becomes "slightly unfree" it will tend to become less and less free until it is fully captured by one entity. This is seen through declining production quantities accompanied by increasing prices, with one entity (or occasionally a cartel) accumulating most or all of the resulting excess profits.
A capitalist society cannot allow this to happen. Understand this point. One way or another, any capitalist society *must* solve this problem, or collapse.
So how do you go about solving it? Several approaches have been tried over the years. One approach is price controls: Have the government observe market activity, and if prices appear to be moving outside the competitive range, step in and dictate prices directly. (Example: Rent controlled apartments in New York.) Another approach is to establish limits to the market share that sellers are permitted to capture. (Example: Recently debated U.S. legal limits to how many TV stations you can own.)
It is important to understand that both of these are technically better solutions than "trust-busting" because both of them take action early, while there is still a chance that society might be able to avoid feeling the effects of the problem. Anti-monopoly legislation is, very unfortunately, enforceable only after the fact. As a result, it has the flaws you describe. But you have it backwards: If what you do today is illegal even though it was legal yesterday, the flaw in the legislation is not that it prevents today's activity. The flaw is that it failed to prevent what you were doing yesterday.
So, where does this leave us? On the one hand, we have to accept that flawed trust-busting is a direct consequence of ideological opposition to better alternatives like price controls or regulation. On the other hand, we have to accept that this ideological opposition is not itself invalid. So what we need is a way to ensure the freedom of markets without invoking ponderous government intervention.
What we need is a GNU GPL for markets - a way of automatically, inescapably, and defensibly defending their freedom from the inevitable attacks. If you have any ideas along these lines, please post them.
-Graham
I think you mean: ...hope to be appointed president someday...
There are three kinds of people in business.
1. People who don't have a boss, because they are the boss.
2. People who are a boss, but also have a boss.
3. People who work for living, and have a boss.
Usually, the term "manager" describes Type 2. These people can be fired by either Type 1 people, or bigger Type 2 people. Note that Type 1 people still have constraints on their ability to act; they may be overseen by a board of directors, or answerable to major customers - when I say they don't have a boss, I only mean that there is no individual person who tells them what to do.
Interestingly, Type 3 people can be evaluated on the merits of the contribution they actually make through their work (e.g. how many widgets they assembled or calls they took). Type 3 people are also protected by employment law. As a result, it is very difficult to fire a Type 3 person with a strong work record.
Type 2 people, who are exempted from most of the protections of employment law, are much easier to fire. This makes them very vulnerable to any Type 3 person who finds a way to talk directly to Type 1 people. No-one likes to be vulnerable, so Type 2 people spend a lot of energy finding ways to strengthen their positions.
There are two ways to do this. The first is to have technical skill beyond the capability of any Type 3 person. If the Type 2 person is very smart or competent, or started as a Type 3 person in the same field, this might come naturally. If not, then it can be simulated by manipulation of the methods of delivery for knowledge and training.
The second way is to create various kinds of barriers that prevent the undesired outcome. For example, many Type 2 people jealously guard access to the Type 1 people, to make sure that no Type 3 person could ever voice a negative opinion. Many Type 2 people also keep a file (perhaps a mental one) on all the Type 3 people in their circle, so that they can (a) undermine their credibility if they ever actually talk to the Type 1 people, and (b) justify firing them if they become too much of a threat.
Type 2 people who use the second method are referred to as "professional managers." Many of the current ills of society are frequently attributed to the rise of a professional management class, even though cluelessness at the higher ranks surely dates back at least to Roman times.
-Graham
This is shipping now, and supports VST, RTAS and the Windows one nobody uses - MMC or MMT or whatever it is. The only thing standing between you and this is $329 per "virtual vocalist". Leon and Lola are shipping, with Miriam soon to come.
-Graham
No one said that. In fact, when that question was asked, the answer was "Okay, so we have to build it strong enough so that can't happen." And they did - the WTC was capable of withstanding an impact by the largest jet transport that existed at the time of its construction.
In fact the WTC towers were capable of (mostly) surviving 9/11, if only there had been better fire retardants on the supporting columns - which had been recommended repeatedly, particularly after the 1993 attacks. Nobody said that was a worry for another day, either, they just didn't want to pay for it.
So, bad example.
-Graham
Oops, corrected link: Zoran TL800
What about this: http://www.zoran.com/products/literature/dtv/TLG_T L880_v1.1_03_08_10.pdf
...but can it interface directly to DirecTV, the way a DirecTiVo does?
-Graham
TV should be directly viewer-supported. There are some key problems with the ad-supported model from the point of view of a TV viewer.
Basically, any given viewer wants some particular shows to continue and get funded, and doesn't care one way or the other about the rest. Under the ad-supported model, all the viewer can do is watch the show. This (presumably, and indirectly) contributes to high ratings, which attract ad dollars, which means the show gets to stay on the air.
If viewers contributed dollars directly, then someone who really likes a show could contribute a larger sum. In a case like, oh, hmm, FIREFLY, any given fanatical viewer could easily take on the financial burden 10 or even 100 "typical" viewers.
If we're going to make a radical change to television, let's do something that allows viewers, not advertisers, to pick the shows that succeed.
-Graham
It isn't TiVo doing this to you.
The Simpsons, Futurama, Friends, Seinfeld and Frasier represent a generation of television that was compellingly watchable. Some of those shows are still soldiering on, some of them aren't. As they die off, they are being replaced by shows like Survivor, The Bachelor, American Idol and Fear Factor. Yes, there are a few decent shows still being produced, but they are being crowded out of the schedule. I haven't added up the numbers, but I would bet that in the 2000 - 2003 time period there were less than half as many great new shows as there were in 1996 - 1999.
What it boils down to is, the advertising market has crashed, so budgets for TV series production have disappeared. Reality shows are cheap to produce, and they pull in the numbers. So that's where TV has gone. If you like reality shows, this is a Golden Age. If you don't, welcome to the post-TV consciousness.
TiVo or no TiVo.
-Graham
And you talk about making assumptions.
Good day sir.
-Graham
Um, that's the opposite of what you said.
Whatever.
-Graham
Regardless of your economic arrangement with the theater, you DO have a socially courteous obligation to your theater-mates. The fact that you choose not to recognize this is what leads me to believe you are a social lout. Perhaps you choose other ways to express your boorishness.
-Graham
Read your previous post. It's all between the theater and you - your holy individualist libertarian CONTRACT does not extend to one whit of consideration regarding the other human beings with whom you will be sitting for two hours. Their investment is not of interest to you, and you don't care what they like or don't like. So you plonk yourself down in the best seat in the house, but you're still pissed off that you have to watch the insipid slide show. No doubt you would prefer if all those other people simply left it open in preparation for your arrival.
So far this is all pretty much verbatim from your own posts. It's not much of a leap to figure that you also don't care whether your actions interfere with other people's enjoyment of the movie.
-Graham
Your contract with the theater does not guarantee you a particular seat.
I bet you talk on your cellphone during the movie, or at least comment loudly when you think you've thought of something funny.
If you want to stay home, you have my earnest blessing.
-Graham
Well, if you get the best seat in the house, then everyone else derives less value from their investment than you do. This is offset by the fact that they watch less of the insipid slide show, and gain additional time in their lives for other pursuits. Something to think about.
-Graham
If you don't want to watch the insipid slide show, don't get there so early. The world won't come to an end if you don't sit in seventh row center.
For the most part I like the trailers. At least with movie trailers there's still some effort going into the production values, in distinct contrast to most TV ads. It bugs me when the trailers are badly mistargeted, though.
I agree with you on the cartoons. That was a great tradition, and it's sad that it was lost. What happened to cartoons, anyway? Were they not selling enough popcorn, or something?
-Graham
I don't know if it was in Battlestar Galactica or not, but Darth Vader said it to Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back. Lando had betrayed Luke et. al. to Vader, in return for Vader's promise to hand them over for Lando's safekeeping. Of course Vader broke that promise, because it was patently dumb, and if this had been real life, Lando would have seen through it immediately. (The whole point of the affair is that Vader wants these people.) It's one of those cases where some writer came up with the line, and then severely bent all rational circumstance and characterization just to force a situation where the line would be appropriate.
But it was a good line. And if it were real life, they probably wouldn't have been on a floating city with weird dangling pipes in the first place.
-Graham