Have you done the research to see just who you're disagreeing with about this?
And why they engineered TCP the way they did?
I won't pretend that I've walked through the experiments to try to verify their conclusions. I'm not even sure I know enough to interpret to interpret But...the people shouting the warnings aren't your average Chicken Littles.
How long has it been since government paid more than lip service to all the things they aren't allowed to do?
Matt Taibbi has a piece in Rolling Stone this month that shows how the SEC is pretty much totally in bed with the companies they're supposed to be regulating. It's well worth reading, if you can put up with the profanity. Why isn't Wall Street in Jail?
If you're doing something like rocket science, then, yeah, you probably want someone with an advanced degree from a school that does a good job teaching computer science. Although you're probably much better off with someone with that degree in math, with, say, a minor in CS. Personally, I'd generally avoid the self-taught programmers with hard science degrees...it's tough to be an "expert" in more than one field (esp. if you give any weight to my general definition of "expert: n. someone who's an idiot in any other field." <G> They manage to do some amazing things, but they make some crazy decisions. (I worked one contract where they were getting all their sample data into SQL Server. My job was to move the data from there into the Access database they all knew how to use and manipulate, and add a couple of queries there to make life easier for them. They were adamant about not adding anything like indexes or primary keys. The system more or less worked, but I'm really glad I didn't have to look at that mess for more than a week, much less support it long-term).
If you're a mega-corp that wants a cookie-cutter plug-and-play drone to take up space in your cube farm and get an average amount of work done doing something stupid (say, maybe, the company's marketing website), giving bonus points to the college degree does make sense. They've learned to put up with BS requirements, show up on time, and jump through arbitrary hoops. PHB's rarely get fired for hiring someone safe who likes punching the time clock.
If you're a smaller company which makes its living producing software that customers have to actually enjoy using, and every member of the team has to carry his weight or they take down the company...there's a lot to be said for hiring people who haven't learned the bad habits college teaches or picked up a lot of experience in the cube farms. I've worked at a couple of places like that. They had one or two senior developers who were rock stars, then a handful of less experienced staff (with a wide range of experience) they could train to do things the way they wanted. Make up for the lack of experience by making them show they're smart and have a clue about the basics, then run them ragged. Getting someone who's self-taught and willing to work 80 hours a week for chump change is a better bet in that situation. (And, no...I was most definitely not the rock star at either of those jobs).
For a startup, where you have 1 or 2 developers who are either going to make or break the company...I'd still much prefer someone who was self-taught. Yes, it takes more effort to find awesome candidates. And the ones who are awesome for the "initial push" phase (where the only thing that matters is pushing out mostly working code as fast as possible) won't necessarily be willing to transition to the next phase, when the pace starts to slow down a little and you get to start worrying things about maintainability and fixing bugs. In a lot of ways, I think that's a big part of what killed Netscape.
Come to think of it, that killed at least one startup I've worked at. (Just for the record: Totally not my fault. They hired me. A month later the investors decided to quit sinking money into it. And gave the founder two weeks to find another source...sadly, it was mostly office politics and personality conflicts that took down a company that could have been great).
Anyway.
Actually, if I were in that situation, and there were a college nearby with a decent computer science program (most are absolutely horrid), I'd probably put some effort into getting to know the staff and kids, then ask them who the real geeks are who are always hanging out in the computer lab playing in programming languages nobody else understands. Then spend some time getting to know them and get their recommendations about who to hire. But that could just be because I've read too much Paul Graham.
You're absolutely correct about the diminishing returns. The current system's broken, and it's steadily getting worse.
I'm not sure I agree with your examples about the "expense of the commonweal" [great phrase, BTW]. I'm not sure I disagree, mind you. Genocides and environmental destruction are pretty blatantly sheer Evil and deserve appropriate punishment.
Violent strike-breakers are, of course, also Bad. It's hard to say whether scabs are. And union representatives who use violence to convince workers to join the union are just as bad as thugs who use violence to break up picket lines. Or the unions who use lobbyists to convince lawmakers to force employers to deal with collective bargaining in the first place. California and the auto industry are two prime examples of just how effectively out-of-control unions can destroy economies.
Smuggling...if there wasn't a demand for forbidden goods, or the black market profits weren't worth the risk of getting caught, then it wouldn't be an issue. I consider it a moral imperative to defy unjust laws.
I just see so many more problems that I think are so much worse that a few pampered trust-fund babies just don't seem worth a blip on the radar.
This is relevant early in your career. I spent around a year and a half doing tech support, showing my boss (and the development team) that I knew how to write decent code. Then I switched to the development team, and it really hasn't been an issue since.
[I'm sure there are jobs I've missed out on because of my lack of a degree...I'm also sure I wouldn't have wanted to work at those companies anyway]
Depending on where they live (Mexico and South America are some of the worst about this), the only foreigners who can legally immigrate are the ones who are already [comparatively] rich.
Then again, I guess I'll admit that I think the vast majority of "our" laws are so stupid that I don't have much respect left for them.
It's been my experience that people who teach themselves to program computers make better team members than the ones who just decided to major in CS because it seemed like a lucrative field. Call me crazy.
Some of the best programmers/architects I've ever worked with were music majors.
Then again, that's just anecdotal, and you claim to have statistics on your side. So I'm obviously wrong.
The entire point of a resume is to get past the stupid HR drone and get an interview. It's been my experience that interviewing skills count for a lot more than a degree.
I dropped out of college to defend my country [well, that's what I thought at the time]. After I got out of the military, I thought about going back to get something resembling a CS degree.
Every university around the country that I've looked at (except MIT) just offers dim shadows of an actual CS education. There's no "hard work" involved. I just refuse to throw time and money away on courses that I could easily teach.
A CS degree is nothing except a cert from some institution that (presumably) other similar institutions have certified as "good enough." The cert for the degree really only says "this person is willing to jump through our hoops, so he'll fit in well in a bureaucracy."
If you're hiring cookie cutter programmers for a cube farm, that's probably all that matters.
OTOH, most professors are in academia because they couldn't cut a job in the real world, I've seen and worked with code from a few different PhD's, and it was generally awful.
I hate dealing with new-hires fresh out of school. They're usually arrogant jerks who think they know everything because, maybe, they had to code a few homework problems. So they want to throw out existing coding standards are write things the misguided way they learn in school. Sure, learning theory is awesome, but most schools do an extremely poor job of it.
I have one friend with a Master's in MIS who's now doing extremely well selling consulting services. He supported himself for a few years by coding, but he was always just in it for the money, and he never was very good at it.
I have another with a Master's in CS who's quite happy being a stagnant programmer, playing Wally from Dilbert. He's fine at what he does, and he managed to lie his way through the interview process [and a couple of years of actually working at the company] by pretending he had 2 or 3 years experience (that was his biggest stumbling block to breaking in).
Me? I grew up programming. Then I dropped out of college to fight in a war that was over before I got out of boot camp. Then they put me through a school that pretty much boiled down to "this is how to teach yourself." When I got out, I worked my way up from tech support.
So I guess I'm one of those self-taught yahoos you dismiss. Then again, I can understand a text book as well as anyone else (and better than most), and I still get into plenty of clashes with the cowboy "get 'er done" coders (and I know there are times that's the only meaningful option). And the only time I've ever had a "serious" correction on a code review was a senior guy who gave me a stern talking-to about how important it is keep each statement on a single line, instead of inserting line breaks. Oh, and my current boss was shocked when he found out a couple of months ago that I don't have a degree.
Oh, and the biggest difference between me and my two friends with degrees? I still make it a point to keep learning stuff that's new to me.
It's gotten to the point where I just don't have any interest in working at a company that seriously considers a degree a requirement. So it works out. Even if I do someday go back and finish my degree up (and it won't be in a major as stupid and useless as CS, unless I go to a school that actually does a good job teaching it, like MIT), I won't mention it on my resume.
Those cashiers, house cleaners, and other people doing crap work have the opportunity to improve their lives and make something of themselves. Maybe they won't get rich...there's definitely a bit of luck involved there. But, as Edison said, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration."
I have a friend who's a single mom working a full-time crap job and carrying a full course load working on her master's. Mommy and Daddy aren't supporting her, and she claims her ex- always has to borrow back any alimony/child support he ever gets around to paying. I think she'll wind up doing extremely well for herself.
If you manage to make it into the ranks of the filthy rich, great for you! It's your money--do what you want. I think it's a shame when they ruin their descendants with lives of luxury, but that doesn't hurt me or anyone else (except by depriving me of the contributions their good genes might have provided to society...but I expect the "drive to get rich" is more of a nurture than nature kind of thing).
I served in the military with a guy who apparently came from at least a fairly well-off family. When he turned 18, his dad handed him $50,000. And told him that was the last penny he'd ever get. Including the will. So he invested it and joined the military. I wonder how his investments are doing these days? AFAIK, this guy didn't own a car at all.
These people have proven that they can create something that people want (whether it's war materials for Nazis, being a figurehead CEO at something as worthless as an investment trading bank, or bootlegging booze during the Depression). Which means that their work makes someone happier, and society a slightly better place. [Now, if what they're doing actually hurts someone else, like the Bushes, then, by all means, punish them appropriately and find some way to redistribute their wealth to their victims]. If they decide to retire early, then society loses that benefit.
Look at how Apple's panicking about Jobs' absence.
Odds are, they're also investing that money to grow it even more. Some of that will go into startups. Successful startups are, really, what drives innovation (well, them and the military). They also fall into the category of "small business," so, odds are, they're part of that group that employees most of the people in this country. Take away that investment money (because, what's the point of dying with a single penny to your name if you don't get to decide what happens to it?), and quite a few startups (specifically, the ones that investors who've already proven they're successful at business) either fail sooner or don't happen at all.
I agree with you that the system's far from perfect. But the only real improvement I can think of [for this particular talking point] would be to permanently eliminate any estate tax at all (because taxation is theft, and theft is immoral).
People talk about "middle" and "upper" class, but they don't really mean today what they did during the Middle Ages. Sure, the trust-fund brats have estates because of something their ancestors did. But they don't get serfs, and the middle class don't have to bow and scrape and worry they might decide to kill you for looking at them wrong. (We have police for that, but that's a different discussion). We seem to be trending back to the "bad old days" with a few dynastic families holding too much political power. But, if people are stupid enough to elect another Bush into the White House, we all deserve what we get.
Sure, the wealth gap's wider than ever. But the gap between classes has probably never been weaker in history. These days, a homeless guy can wander into a public library, get onto the internet for free, teach himself PHP, and use a $10/month shared hosting account to build the next Facebook.
And I'm not sure how important the "wealth gap" really is. I think the "lifestyle gap" is much more informative. Sure, I don't have a garage full of custom hand-built Ferraris, but my car does the [theoret
Let's say that you're paying for 768K bandwidth, but the provider has a 6 MB pipe to your house. Google pays your ISP (who you've already paid) a premium to have YouTube delivered at that speed.
On the surface, it kind of looks like good, clean, free market fun. Everyone else has the option to also pay that tax and get the speed boost.
Except that spunky, snot-nosed start-up that was getting ready to mop the floor with YouTube. They're already running as lean as they can get (pretty much by definition). Suddenly their super whiz-bang site is horribly slow, and they disappear into oblivion.
You wind up with a multi-tiered internet experience, where the major players with deep pockets can afford to dazzle you, while the also-rans disappear.
I don't have any problems with google paying a premium to their service provider (I'm guessing at this point they have their own direct trunk connections). Anyone planning to compete has to realize they're playing in the Big Leagues.
The situation would be different if there weren't a [legalized] duopoly [at best] in place for the vast majority of Americans. I don't generally believe that adding more laws and regulations is the answer. But there's absolutely nothing "free market" about broadband connections, and it's very unlikely there ever will be.
If I'm paying for a 768K connection, that's what I want to get. Not 768K plus a few special premium channels for free. It seems like that would be a better customer experience, but it just kills competition.
The internet is the success it has been because there's a more-or-less level playing field for the content providers. I don't want ISPs to decide that the Wild West days are over, and that it's time to civilize the place by making sure the current major players can never be toppled from their thrones.
Besides, that example is horribly unlikely. Odds are, there's just an average bandwidth of 768K (or whatever you are paying for) to your house. Google paying for a "premium" connection means that they get preferential treatment when that bandwidth gets distributed. Meaning that the ISP has to examine the packets, and everyone else's get dropped first when the pipeline is saturated. Maybe they even preferential treatment and get added to the front of the queue at each hop.
Which is exactly the effect you don't want, but it looks like the effect you think you want.
OTOH, while I think this legislation sounds like a decent idea, at least the summary I've read and taken at face value, I don't for a second believe that it has a snowball's chance in Hell of still being decent by the time it gets through the legislative process.
I just don't trust Congress. If they start passing bills that I believe are in my best interests, I might change my mind and think this is a good idea. Until then, I'm against them doing anything at all except repealing the monstrosities they already have in place.
Except that google paying a premium to get higher speed special treatment is effectively the same thing as google paying to slow down everyone else. Anyone who wants to compete is forced to pay the same premium.
Google has paid something like that premium by doing things like setting up regional data centers for quicker response times. But that doesn't involve your ISP.
I don't have youtube access, so I don't have anything to go on but your summary.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "anti-American agenda."
If it involves "screw the country...I don't care about anything except whatever it takes to get reelected," then I think I can safely say that the vast majority of Congress has an anti-American agenda.
Then again, maybe you just thought it was nutty because getting a majority to agree on what qualifies as "anti-American" is a pretty ridiculous idea.
At least they're being honest about the way they view us. You pretty much nailed that "herd animal grazing on whatever slop the farmer is throwing in front of my face."
The biggest problem with this is that we've already spent it all on other projects, to make the deficit look like a mere catastrophe. There's pretty much nothing left in those accounts except IOUs. And last year they fell into the red.
Like every other Ponzi scheme, social security was doomed to go broke from the day they implemented it. That's why it was only intended to be a temporary emergency program.
They only have two options. 1) Cut the budget completely to the bone (as in, quit doing pretty much anything else) to pay back the IOUs or 2) Crank up the printing presses, which means more inflation.
So far the rest of the world's willing to keep extending our credit. Mainly because the global economy's all hitched together...when we go over the cliff, we're taking everyone else with us. Except possibly China.
Grandpa thanks you for being stupid enough to pay for his retirement. I feel obligated to keep contributing to the people who were stupid enough to trust the government to keep the scam going...as long as we can start talking very seriously about bringing the government back under control. Anyone Gen X or younger who counts on seeing a penny of that tribute money deserves what he gets.
I've been told that Iceland pretty much had a free market economy for a while during the Dark Ages. But those examples are definitely the exceptions, not the rule.
There's always at least one rotten apple who's willing to do whatever it takes to be able to order everyone else around. And "whatever it takes" usually winds up meaning concentration camps and mass graves.
I suppose people might learn enough responsibility and self-reliance to be vigilant about nascent dictators and defend themselves against such. But I think that would take too big a change in human nature.
And even if you rebooted the system so everyone starts on a level playing field, some people are just better than others at earning/saving money.
Let's say some factory produces a series of products that are huge hits. Everyone wants one, so the workers in that factory get piles of money. Most of them squander it. A few save it, and decide to invest to help a factory down the street that's had a run of bad luck keep going, so it's workers don't starve to death.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're one of the ones behind bufferbloat.net (or even just one of the contributors), I want to say "Thank you."
AQM is one of the first steps in fixing the problem. It's still just a start. This is a big hairy monster with sharp, pointy teeth.
Have you done the research to see just who you're disagreeing with about this?
And why they engineered TCP the way they did?
I won't pretend that I've walked through the experiments to try to verify their conclusions. I'm not even sure I know enough to interpret to interpret But...the people shouting the warnings aren't your average Chicken Littles.
How long has it been since government paid more than lip service to all the things they aren't allowed to do?
Matt Taibbi has a piece in Rolling Stone this month that shows how the SEC is pretty much totally in bed with the companies they're supposed to be regulating. It's well worth reading, if you can put up with the profanity. Why isn't Wall Street in Jail?
.
It really totally depends on the situation.
If you're doing something like rocket science, then, yeah, you probably want someone with an advanced degree from a school that does a good job teaching computer science. Although you're probably much better off with someone with that degree in math, with, say, a minor in CS. Personally, I'd generally avoid the self-taught programmers with hard science degrees...it's tough to be an "expert" in more than one field (esp. if you give any weight to my general definition of "expert: n. someone who's an idiot in any other field." <G> They manage to do some amazing things, but they make some crazy decisions. (I worked one contract where they were getting all their sample data into SQL Server. My job was to move the data from there into the Access database they all knew how to use and manipulate, and add a couple of queries there to make life easier for them. They were adamant about not adding anything like indexes or primary keys. The system more or less worked, but I'm really glad I didn't have to look at that mess for more than a week, much less support it long-term).
If you're a mega-corp that wants a cookie-cutter plug-and-play drone to take up space in your cube farm and get an average amount of work done doing something stupid (say, maybe, the company's marketing website), giving bonus points to the college degree does make sense. They've learned to put up with BS requirements, show up on time, and jump through arbitrary hoops. PHB's rarely get fired for hiring someone safe who likes punching the time clock.
If you're a smaller company which makes its living producing software that customers have to actually enjoy using, and every member of the team has to carry his weight or they take down the company...there's a lot to be said for hiring people who haven't learned the bad habits college teaches or picked up a lot of experience in the cube farms. I've worked at a couple of places like that. They had one or two senior developers who were rock stars, then a handful of less experienced staff (with a wide range of experience) they could train to do things the way they wanted. Make up for the lack of experience by making them show they're smart and have a clue about the basics, then run them ragged. Getting someone who's self-taught and willing to work 80 hours a week for chump change is a better bet in that situation. (And, no...I was most definitely not the rock star at either of those jobs).
For a startup, where you have 1 or 2 developers who are either going to make or break the company...I'd still much prefer someone who was self-taught. Yes, it takes more effort to find awesome candidates. And the ones who are awesome for the "initial push" phase (where the only thing that matters is pushing out mostly working code as fast as possible) won't necessarily be willing to transition to the next phase, when the pace starts to slow down a little and you get to start worrying things about maintainability and fixing bugs. In a lot of ways, I think that's a big part of what killed Netscape.
Come to think of it, that killed at least one startup I've worked at. (Just for the record: Totally not my fault. They hired me. A month later the investors decided to quit sinking money into it. And gave the founder two weeks to find another source...sadly, it was mostly office politics and personality conflicts that took down a company that could have been great).
Anyway.
Actually, if I were in that situation, and there were a college nearby with a decent computer science program (most are absolutely horrid), I'd probably put some effort into getting to know the staff and kids, then ask them who the real geeks are who are always hanging out in the computer lab playing in programming languages nobody else understands. Then spend some time getting to know them and get their recommendations about who to hire. But that could just be because I've read too much Paul Graham.
The guy who shows up for the first time that we
Thank you, for such an excellent response!
You're absolutely correct about the diminishing returns. The current system's broken, and it's steadily getting worse.
I'm not sure I agree with your examples about the "expense of the commonweal" [great phrase, BTW]. I'm not sure I disagree, mind you. Genocides and environmental destruction are pretty blatantly sheer Evil and deserve appropriate punishment.
Violent strike-breakers are, of course, also Bad. It's hard to say whether scabs are. And union representatives who use violence to convince workers to join the union are just as bad as thugs who use violence to break up picket lines. Or the unions who use lobbyists to convince lawmakers to force employers to deal with collective bargaining in the first place. California and the auto industry are two prime examples of just how effectively out-of-control unions can destroy economies.
Smuggling...if there wasn't a demand for forbidden goods, or the black market profits weren't worth the risk of getting caught, then it wouldn't be an issue. I consider it a moral imperative to defy unjust laws.
I just see so many more problems that I think are so much worse that a few pampered trust-fund babies just don't seem worth a blip on the radar.
This is relevant early in your career. I spent around a year and a half doing tech support, showing my boss (and the development team) that I knew how to write decent code. Then I switched to the development team, and it really hasn't been an issue since.
[I'm sure there are jobs I've missed out on because of my lack of a degree...I'm also sure I wouldn't have wanted to work at those companies anyway]
Yes! *This* is the right attitude and path.
I wish you the best of luck.
Depending on where they live (Mexico and South America are some of the worst about this), the only foreigners who can legally immigrate are the ones who are already [comparatively] rich.
Then again, I guess I'll admit that I think the vast majority of "our" laws are so stupid that I don't have much respect left for them.
Or people skills.
I can't speak for the GP, but...
It's been my experience that people who teach themselves to program computers make better team members than the ones who just decided to major in CS because it seemed like a lucrative field. Call me crazy.
Some of the best programmers/architects I've ever worked with were music majors.
Then again, that's just anecdotal, and you claim to have statistics on your side. So I'm obviously wrong.
Who cares?
The entire point of a resume is to get past the stupid HR drone and get an interview. It's been my experience that interviewing skills count for a lot more than a degree.
LMAO.
You're an idiot.
I dropped out of college to defend my country [well, that's what I thought at the time]. After I got out of the military, I thought about going back to get something resembling a CS degree.
Every university around the country that I've looked at (except MIT) just offers dim shadows of an actual CS education. There's no "hard work" involved. I just refuse to throw time and money away on courses that I could easily teach.
A CS degree is nothing except a cert from some institution that (presumably) other similar institutions have certified as "good enough." The cert for the degree really only says "this person is willing to jump through our hoops, so he'll fit in well in a bureaucracy."
If you're hiring cookie cutter programmers for a cube farm, that's probably all that matters.
OTOH, most professors are in academia because they couldn't cut a job in the real world, I've seen and worked with code from a few different PhD's, and it was generally awful.
I hate dealing with new-hires fresh out of school. They're usually arrogant jerks who think they know everything because, maybe, they had to code a few homework problems. So they want to throw out existing coding standards are write things the misguided way they learn in school. Sure, learning theory is awesome, but most schools do an extremely poor job of it.
I have one friend with a Master's in MIS who's now doing extremely well selling consulting services. He supported himself for a few years by coding, but he was always just in it for the money, and he never was very good at it.
I have another with a Master's in CS who's quite happy being a stagnant programmer, playing Wally from Dilbert. He's fine at what he does, and he managed to lie his way through the interview process [and a couple of years of actually working at the company] by pretending he had 2 or 3 years experience (that was his biggest stumbling block to breaking in).
Me? I grew up programming. Then I dropped out of college to fight in a war that was over before I got out of boot camp. Then they put me through a school that pretty much boiled down to "this is how to teach yourself." When I got out, I worked my way up from tech support.
So I guess I'm one of those self-taught yahoos you dismiss. Then again, I can understand a text book as well as anyone else (and better than most), and I still get into plenty of clashes with the cowboy "get 'er done" coders (and I know there are times that's the only meaningful option). And the only time I've ever had a "serious" correction on a code review was a senior guy who gave me a stern talking-to about how important it is keep each statement on a single line, instead of inserting line breaks. Oh, and my current boss was shocked when he found out a couple of months ago that I don't have a degree.
Oh, and the biggest difference between me and my two friends with degrees? I still make it a point to keep learning stuff that's new to me.
It's gotten to the point where I just don't have any interest in working at a company that seriously considers a degree a requirement. So it works out. Even if I do someday go back and finish my degree up (and it won't be in a major as stupid and useless as CS, unless I go to a school that actually does a good job teaching it, like MIT), I won't mention it on my resume.
Those cashiers, house cleaners, and other people doing crap work have the opportunity to improve their lives and make something of themselves. Maybe they won't get rich...there's definitely a bit of luck involved there. But, as Edison said, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration."
I have a friend who's a single mom working a full-time crap job and carrying a full course load working on her master's. Mommy and Daddy aren't supporting her, and she claims her ex- always has to borrow back any alimony/child support he ever gets around to paying. I think she'll wind up doing extremely well for herself.
If you manage to make it into the ranks of the filthy rich, great for you! It's your money--do what you want. I think it's a shame when they ruin their descendants with lives of luxury, but that doesn't hurt me or anyone else (except by depriving me of the contributions their good genes might have provided to society...but I expect the "drive to get rich" is more of a nurture than nature kind of thing).
I served in the military with a guy who apparently came from at least a fairly well-off family. When he turned 18, his dad handed him $50,000. And told him that was the last penny he'd ever get. Including the will. So he invested it and joined the military. I wonder how his investments are doing these days? AFAIK, this guy didn't own a car at all.
These people have proven that they can create something that people want (whether it's war materials for Nazis, being a figurehead CEO at something as worthless as an investment trading bank, or bootlegging booze during the Depression). Which means that their work makes someone happier, and society a slightly better place. [Now, if what they're doing actually hurts someone else, like the Bushes, then, by all means, punish them appropriately and find some way to redistribute their wealth to their victims]. If they decide to retire early, then society loses that benefit.
Look at how Apple's panicking about Jobs' absence.
Odds are, they're also investing that money to grow it even more. Some of that will go into startups. Successful startups are, really, what drives innovation (well, them and the military). They also fall into the category of "small business," so, odds are, they're part of that group that employees most of the people in this country. Take away that investment money (because, what's the point of dying with a single penny to your name if you don't get to decide what happens to it?), and quite a few startups (specifically, the ones that investors who've already proven they're successful at business) either fail sooner or don't happen at all.
I agree with you that the system's far from perfect. But the only real improvement I can think of [for this particular talking point] would be to permanently eliminate any estate tax at all (because taxation is theft, and theft is immoral).
People talk about "middle" and "upper" class, but they don't really mean today what they did during the Middle Ages. Sure, the trust-fund brats have estates because of something their ancestors did. But they don't get serfs, and the middle class don't have to bow and scrape and worry they might decide to kill you for looking at them wrong. (We have police for that, but that's a different discussion). We seem to be trending back to the "bad old days" with a few dynastic families holding too much political power. But, if people are stupid enough to elect another Bush into the White House, we all deserve what we get.
Sure, the wealth gap's wider than ever. But the gap between classes has probably never been weaker in history. These days, a homeless guy can wander into a public library, get onto the internet for free, teach himself PHP, and use a $10/month shared hosting account to build the next Facebook.
And I'm not sure how important the "wealth gap" really is. I think the "lifestyle gap" is much more informative. Sure, I don't have a garage full of custom hand-built Ferraris, but my car does the [theoret
It has exactly the same effect.
Let's say that you're paying for 768K bandwidth, but the provider has a 6 MB pipe to your house. Google pays your ISP (who you've already paid) a premium to have YouTube delivered at that speed.
On the surface, it kind of looks like good, clean, free market fun. Everyone else has the option to also pay that tax and get the speed boost.
Except that spunky, snot-nosed start-up that was getting ready to mop the floor with YouTube. They're already running as lean as they can get (pretty much by definition). Suddenly their super whiz-bang site is horribly slow, and they disappear into oblivion.
You wind up with a multi-tiered internet experience, where the major players with deep pockets can afford to dazzle you, while the also-rans disappear.
I don't have any problems with google paying a premium to their service provider (I'm guessing at this point they have their own direct trunk connections). Anyone planning to compete has to realize they're playing in the Big Leagues.
The situation would be different if there weren't a [legalized] duopoly [at best] in place for the vast majority of Americans. I don't generally believe that adding more laws and regulations is the answer. But there's absolutely nothing "free market" about broadband connections, and it's very unlikely there ever will be.
If I'm paying for a 768K connection, that's what I want to get. Not 768K plus a few special premium channels for free. It seems like that would be a better customer experience, but it just kills competition.
The internet is the success it has been because there's a more-or-less level playing field for the content providers. I don't want ISPs to decide that the Wild West days are over, and that it's time to civilize the place by making sure the current major players can never be toppled from their thrones.
Besides, that example is horribly unlikely. Odds are, there's just an average bandwidth of 768K (or whatever you are paying for) to your house. Google paying for a "premium" connection means that they get preferential treatment when that bandwidth gets distributed. Meaning that the ISP has to examine the packets, and everyone else's get dropped first when the pipeline is saturated. Maybe they even preferential treatment and get added to the front of the queue at each hop.
Which is exactly the effect you don't want, but it looks like the effect you think you want.
OTOH, while I think this legislation sounds like a decent idea, at least the summary I've read and taken at face value, I don't for a second believe that it has a snowball's chance in Hell of still being decent by the time it gets through the legislative process.
I just don't trust Congress. If they start passing bills that I believe are in my best interests, I might change my mind and think this is a good idea. Until then, I'm against them doing anything at all except repealing the monstrosities they already have in place.
Except that google paying a premium to get higher speed special treatment is effectively the same thing as google paying to slow down everyone else. Anyone who wants to compete is forced to pay the same premium.
Google has paid something like that premium by doing things like setting up regional data centers for quicker response times. But that doesn't involve your ISP.
I don't have youtube access, so I don't have anything to go on but your summary.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "anti-American agenda."
If it involves "screw the country...I don't care about anything except whatever it takes to get reelected," then I think I can safely say that the vast majority of Congress has an anti-American agenda.
Then again, maybe you just thought it was nutty because getting a majority to agree on what qualifies as "anti-American" is a pretty ridiculous idea.
At least they're being honest about the way they view us. You pretty much nailed that "herd animal grazing on whatever slop the farmer is throwing in front of my face."
The biggest problem with this is that we've already spent it all on other projects, to make the deficit look like a mere catastrophe. There's pretty much nothing left in those accounts except IOUs. And last year they fell into the red.
Like every other Ponzi scheme, social security was doomed to go broke from the day they implemented it. That's why it was only intended to be a temporary emergency program.
They only have two options. 1) Cut the budget completely to the bone (as in, quit doing pretty much anything else) to pay back the IOUs or 2) Crank up the printing presses, which means more inflation.
So far the rest of the world's willing to keep extending our credit. Mainly because the global economy's all hitched together...when we go over the cliff, we're taking everyone else with us. Except possibly China.
Grandpa thanks you for being stupid enough to pay for his retirement. I feel obligated to keep contributing to the people who were stupid enough to trust the government to keep the scam going...as long as we can start talking very seriously about bringing the government back under control. Anyone Gen X or younger who counts on seeing a penny of that tribute money deserves what he gets.
Yep.
The real key is creating something people want. Even if your selling to monsters (the Bushes) or breaking some stupid law (Kennedys).
Ultimately, supply and demand wins.
Yep, exactly. As a friend of mine likes to point out, we have exactly the government (and the society) we deserve.
Just be careful to have a plan, and that you aren't going to replace it with something worse.
Very true.
I've been told that Iceland pretty much had a free market economy for a while during the Dark Ages. But those examples are definitely the exceptions, not the rule.
Isaac Asimov on IQ
Nowhere, because it doesn't work.
There's always at least one rotten apple who's willing to do whatever it takes to be able to order everyone else around. And "whatever it takes" usually winds up meaning concentration camps and mass graves.
I suppose people might learn enough responsibility and self-reliance to be vigilant about nascent dictators and defend themselves against such. But I think that would take too big a change in human nature.
And even if you rebooted the system so everyone starts on a level playing field, some people are just better than others at earning/saving money.
Let's say some factory produces a series of products that are huge hits. Everyone wants one, so the workers in that factory get piles of money. Most of them squander it. A few save it, and decide to invest to help a factory down the street that's had a run of bad luck keep going, so it's workers don't starve to death.
Oops, that's capitalism.