In the late eighties, a friend, who'd gotten his degree in economics from Chicago, after years of working for the Fed, got so mad he finally quit and got an honest job, programming. He sent out to a number of us a 32 page rant, including small details like his professors at Chicago making jokes in the halls about what they'd do when the public figured out it was all a scam.
I've been arguing this for years. Quick, name *ONE* *MONTH* in the last 10 years that the monthly headlines have *EVER* said "met economists' expectations". Show me three where it was withing std deviation beyond chance.
Science has predictive power. Art has descriptive power. "Economics" has neither - it has the track record of the writers of supermarket tabloid horoscopes. It's the modern Royal Readers of Entrails (what do you want it to read, boss?). (c, m.roth, 1990-2013)
And if *ANY* of it was right, why did we have the S&L scandal, the tech collapse, and the market collapse? Why booms and busts (no, I didn't mean her, slashdot kiddie)?
Specs... my late ex, who was an engineer at the Cape for 17 years, told me about the time she received a new module for the Space Station from the Italian team... and IIRC, there were aluminum connectors that were supposed to go to steel connectors. As a metallurgist, among other things, she had a lot to say about that - look up "bimetallic corrosion".
And so, for the third time in 25 years or so, we see again just how well deregulation works, and cutting the number of auditors, and reducing their power. This is the kind of Freedom (tm) that business needs.
Btw, if you're posting here, I'd give a 99.999% chance that you're not a millionaire; therefore, if you continue thinking there should be less regulation, there's a fine old word for you: sucker.
Otherwise... well, Tom DeLay, former Speaker of the House, was convicted in Texas of money laundering for campaigns...*THROUGH THE RNC*. Laundering money requires at least two guilty parties... so why hasn't the DoJ RICO'd the RNC, instead of going after small, easy fish?
And for alla you Mission Impossible fans, that's *not* my reaction.
Chief: Max, when the password prompt comes up, you've got three chances to get it right, otherwise it will self destruct. Max: Right, chief, here's a bad password (types) here's a second bad password (types) Now I'll type the correct one... Cheif: Max, what's happened? Max: I must have mistyped the good password....
And I can see the folks who use the coffee cup holder on their computer doing this....
Some folks here can't imagine why he'd want to use the old Photoshop. Let me give you turkeys a clueX4 upside the head: in 1995, PC Mag did a review of word processors (and WordPerfect was the big dog, btw, not that piece of crap, Word). In it, they noted that 90% of the users never used more than 10% of the features IN THE WORD PROCESSORS at the time, and of the remaining 10%, they used some of the other 90% of the features perhaps 10% of the time.
So here's a challange: get a 10 yr old copy of a word processor, and use it as you normally would for a week, and write a story telling us how difficult it was, or what you couldn't do.
mark, who'd really like to get a better-working copy of WordPerfect for Linux (there was one on Corel
Linux in 2000), as it was *still* the better wp, and better than OO/LO
So they make more money, it's actually in the US, but they play accounting games to avoid paying taxes for what they get from being in the US.
Lovely. And all the Republicans who go on about loopholes... I'm sure they want to close this one.
Right.
Odd that the comments went off to social programs in the US, like welfare and unemployment - how about *this* "entitlement" program? I understand it's an open scandal in Greece, how the wealthy avoid paying *any* taxes... but this isn't the same thing, no, no, there's nothing here, move along.
If it works on HIV, the technique might be useable for cancer and similar diseases.
And for the homophobes, let me point out this might work on the children of infected mothers (or are you also so ignorant that you don't know anyone can catch it, and it can be inherited?)
Of course, as has been said for decades, AIDS shows that lesbians are God's Chosen People (tm).
So, more workers will be let go, and replaced with cheaper machines? How does this help the rest of us who aren't the owners?
Oh, and someone mentioned shipping costs: a dozen or more years ago, I was arguing this with a neighbor, who was a purchasing agent, and he told me the shipping costs were so low it was still cheaper to make it in China. How much that's changed, with oil speculation, I have no information, but I suspect that's not so much the case any more.
Excerpt: Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.
University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.
The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years. --- end excerpt ---
Later, the author goes on to say, Excerpt: Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?” he told Salon. --- end excerpt ---
Or, as an old net-friend of mine said once, "you're arguing that the D-Day invasion of Normandy was unnecessary, since it was obvious that the Wehrmacht would fall to the mighty French Resistance forces".
And saying that you need your guns to protect you from the govenment means a) you don't believe in democracy; b) hate America, and c) are traitors or fellow-travelers.
If you think that was funny - I've never seen it - you should read the book.
As a lifelong SF fan, let me tell you what it was: a pulp writer's parody? homage? to every single pulp magazine genre that was extant in the late forties and early fifties, when Hubbard was writing. The section of Air Adventures, Detective Stories, Jungle Adventure Stories. Seagoing Adventure, SF, and on, and on. They were perfect... hackneyed pulp writing.
And btw, to Battlefield Earth was published about 4 years before he died. Dianetics, his first foray, is from the late forties, while Dianetics is from the fifties; by the seventies, he was already calling it a "church", and spent something like the last 10 years of his life on his yacht, wanted by the authorities in the UK for tax evasion, as they didn't consider The Church of Scienterifficology a church or religion.
What "really lucrative fiction" were you referring to, followuper?
For *decades*, we've been seeing Studies That Show The Dangers Of Weed (tm). And within the year, sometimes within the month, they're withdrawn, or debunked, or shown to be massively flawed.
Not *ONE* has ever overturned the conclusions of the LaGuardia study of 1941 (completed? '44) http colon//www.drugtext.org/Table/LaGuardia-Committee-Report/
The truth is that the prohibition was created thanks to Hearst's purchase of four very large wood pulp paper mills, and the last head of Prohibition, Anslinger, who wanted his job back, and it's been a useful tool to squash folks who might not agree with you in the ballot box.
And the moralists. (The definition, by a friend years back, is that moralists are TERRIFIED by the thought that Someone, Out There, might be having... FUN!)
I skimmed the first dozen or two comment threads, and this *ain't* slashdot like it was 10 years ago.
Lessee, for one, I gather not one of you know what the phrase comes from.
For another, it seems to have been expanded beyond how close we are to the end - and I think 90% of you have ZERO idea what it's like to live when a crisis could result in everything beyond roaches living on Twinkies being dead in an hour or two.
And the assholes, esp. the Republicans and the neoConfederate "Tea Party"ists who have no interest in securing what's left of the old Soviet Union's arsenal that wound up outside of Russia. Or the effects of global warming on food production, or water.
*sigh*
Instead I see a thread going on about healthcare, instead of the actual subject of the post.
mark "you want a simple, cheap answer for healthcare? Create a national health system like
the UK's, and have doctors work for *it* at a fixed, civil service salary, and screw
the medical insurance companies, like they'd done us for decades"
For one, the folks who "invented" the iPotty need to give away their weapons, their cars, all of their possessions, and let themselves be checked into an assisted living facility, since they're obviously too *STUPID* to live on their own.
None of them have children, either.
Y'know, I bet they don't offer, in the device's warranty, to replace all the iPhones that somewhere between 10% and 25% of the two year olds will throw *into* the potty.
And quality? It's a well-known bit of history (at least among folks who work on their own cars) that around 1925 Henry Ford, the original, sent men to junkyards, to find out what parts of the Model T hadn't worn out, and then had the parts for the new Model A made more cheaply, so they'd wear out sooner.
mark "we won't begin to talk about what you do when your smart house has the blue screen of death"
So, set up an hour or two, maybe even pull in one or two other experienced people, and do a code review on some of the stuff he's complaining about. Listen to him, then explain why it's that way, and what he's learning in school is not necessarily correct for the real world.
Oh, and I'd look at something he wrote, for things like parameter validation and error handling....
I just skimmed a bunch of posts, and I'm wondering if more than 0.1% of you actually read any of the articles about it.
Let's see: it noted lack of access to medical care in mostly the below-median-income (i.e, half the country), due to cost.
But let's not create, say, a national medical system, like the UK's NHS, where they're all on salary, and so have no incentive to push all the newest, most expensive of everything, including what the drug co salesman left them samples of. No, we'd rather spend 25% to 75% or more of our medical dollars for multinational profits, as opposed to healthcare.
Oh, that's right, there was also an article I read yesterday, about a study showing that for-profit hospitals gave, overwhelmingly, worse care than non-profit, due to cost-cutting measures like fewer staff, and less one-on-one staff/patient care.
Slashdot Mirror
In the late eighties, a friend, who'd gotten his degree in economics from Chicago, after years of working for the Fed, got so mad he finally quit and got an honest job, programming. He sent out to a number of us a 32 page rant, including small details like his professors at Chicago making jokes in the halls about what they'd do when the public figured out it was all a scam.
I've been arguing this for years. Quick, name *ONE* *MONTH* in the last 10 years that the monthly headlines have *EVER* said "met economists' expectations". Show me three where it was withing std deviation beyond chance.
Science has predictive power. Art has descriptive power. "Economics" has neither - it has the track record of the writers of supermarket tabloid horoscopes. It's the modern Royal Readers of Entrails (what do you want it to read, boss?). (c, m.roth, 1990-2013)
And if *ANY* of it was right, why did we have the S&L scandal, the tech collapse, and the market collapse? Why booms and busts (no, I didn't mean her, slashdot kiddie)?
Suckers.
mark
Specs... my late ex, who was an engineer at the Cape for 17 years, told me about the time she received a new module for the Space Station from the Italian team... and IIRC, there were aluminum connectors that were supposed to go to steel connectors. As a metallurgist, among other things, she had a lot to say about that - look up "bimetallic corrosion".
mark
And so, for the third time in 25 years or so, we see again just how well deregulation works, and cutting the number of auditors, and reducing their power. This is the kind of Freedom (tm) that business needs.
Btw, if you're posting here, I'd give a 99.999% chance that you're not a millionaire; therefore, if you continue thinking there should be less regulation, there's a fine old word for you: sucker.
mark
Those heretics? Take this to alt.religion.editors
mark, whose web page proudly proclaims Built in vi
But the DoJ is as political as anything else.
Otherwise... well, Tom DeLay, former Speaker of the House, was convicted in Texas of money laundering for campaigns...*THROUGH THE RNC*. Laundering money requires at least two guilty parties... so why hasn't the DoJ RICO'd the RNC, instead of going after small, easy fish?
mark
I'm *so* glad I didn't read this with something in my mouth - I'd have sprayed it all over my monitor.
That's deeply ill....
mark, passing it along
And for alla you Mission Impossible fans, that's *not* my reaction.
Chief: Max, when the password prompt comes up, you've got three chances to get it right, otherwise it will self destruct.
Max: Right, chief, here's a bad password (types) here's a second bad password (types) Now I'll type the correct one...
Cheif: Max, what's happened?
Max: I must have mistyped the good password....
And I can see the folks who use the coffee cup holder on their computer doing this....
mark
Some folks here can't imagine why he'd want to use the old Photoshop. Let me give you turkeys a clueX4 upside the head: in 1995, PC Mag did a review of word processors (and WordPerfect was the big dog, btw, not that piece of crap, Word). In it, they noted that 90% of the users never used more than 10% of the features IN THE WORD PROCESSORS at the time, and of the remaining 10%, they used some of the other 90% of the features perhaps 10% of the time.
So here's a challange: get a 10 yr old copy of a word processor, and use it as you normally would for a week, and write a story telling us how difficult it was, or what you couldn't do.
mark, who'd really like to get a better-working copy of WordPerfect for Linux (there was one on Corel
Linux in 2000), as it was *still* the better wp, and better than OO/LO
I glanced at the headline, and misread it as "Mad scientists more prone to misconduct", and thought, what's surprising about that?
mark "mwuhahahahahahaha!"
So they make more money, it's actually in the US, but they play accounting games to avoid paying taxes for what they get from being in the US.
Lovely. And all the Republicans who go on about loopholes... I'm sure they want to close this one.
Right.
Odd that the comments went off to social programs in the US, like welfare and unemployment - how about *this* "entitlement" program? I understand it's an open scandal in Greece, how the wealthy avoid paying *any* taxes... but this isn't the same thing, no, no, there's nothing here, move along.
mark
There were a few- how else would you explain Grendel and his mother, that Beowulf slew?
mark "and I don't mean the comic book version, you ignorant slashdot sluts!"
I just skimmed two-thirds of the comments here. AFAIK, no one read the link.
To sum up: they say the event they think occured was between 3k and 12k ly away.
Oh, and Michio Kaku is a better physicist than you are, regardless of what he dumbed down for the whatsit channel.
mark
...for the half or two thirds of us that don't carry, or want, a "smart" phone.
mark, not being tracked
If it works on HIV, the technique might be useable for cancer and similar diseases.
And for the homophobes, let me point out this might work on the children of infected mothers (or are you also so ignorant that you don't know anyone can catch it, and it can be inherited?)
Of course, as has been said for decades, AIDS shows that lesbians are God's Chosen People (tm).
mark
Consider that *you* pay to publish in most academic journals; they don't pay *you*. Then you pay for access....
mark "and should lit fic, in the same pay-to-publish journals, be considered vanity fiction?"
Wrong. Salt kills zombies. Silver bullets are for werewolves and vampires.
And for a certain, well-known horseman who wears a mask....
mark
So, more workers will be let go, and replaced with cheaper machines? How does this help the rest of us who aren't the owners?
Oh, and someone mentioned shipping costs: a dozen or more years ago, I was arguing this with a neighbor, who was a purchasing agent, and he told me the shipping costs were so low it was still cheaper to make it in China. How much that's changed, with oil speculation, I have no information, but I suspect that's not so much the case any more.
mark
Seems to me that the NRA's idea of armed guards *everywhere* is less than one step from fascism, not freedom.
mark "don't have a gun; don't need one; not a coward"
Excerpt:
Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated
everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could
have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if
you think about it for more than a minute.
University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in
depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns
out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded
Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its
defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out
in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law
that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the
government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the
Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict
registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to
own guns, sell them or carry them.
The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically
does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely
deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well
as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people,
including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations
altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and
permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.
--- end excerpt ---
Later, the author goes on to say,
Excerpt:
Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich,
notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back.
“Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and
fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7
million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and
artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?” he
told Salon.
--- end excerpt ---
Or, as an old net-friend of mine said once, "you're arguing that the D-Day invasion of Normandy was unnecessary, since it was obvious that the Wehrmacht would fall to the mighty French Resistance forces".
And saying that you need your guns to protect you from the govenment means a) you don't believe in democracy; b) hate America, and c) are traitors or fellow-travelers.
mark "take that and smoke it"
If you think that was funny - I've never seen it - you should read the book.
As a lifelong SF fan, let me tell you what it was: a pulp writer's parody? homage? to every single pulp magazine genre that was extant in the late forties and early fifties, when Hubbard was writing. The section of Air Adventures, Detective Stories, Jungle Adventure Stories. Seagoing Adventure, SF, and on, and on. They were perfect... hackneyed pulp writing.
And btw, to Battlefield Earth was published about 4 years before he died. Dianetics, his first foray, is from the late forties, while Dianetics is from the fifties; by the seventies, he was already calling it a "church", and spent something like the last 10 years of his life on his yacht, wanted by the authorities in the UK for tax evasion, as they didn't consider The Church of Scienterifficology a church or religion.
What "really lucrative fiction" were you referring to, followuper?
mark
For *decades*, we've been seeing Studies That Show The Dangers Of Weed (tm). And within the year, sometimes within the month, they're withdrawn, or debunked, or shown to be massively flawed.
Not *ONE* has ever overturned the conclusions of the LaGuardia study of 1941 (completed? '44) http colon //www.drugtext.org/Table/LaGuardia-Committee-Report/
The truth is that the prohibition was created thanks to Hearst's purchase of four very large wood pulp paper mills, and the last head of Prohibition, Anslinger, who wanted his job back, and it's been a useful tool to squash folks who might not agree with you in the ballot box.
And the moralists. (The definition, by a friend years back, is that moralists are TERRIFIED by the thought that Someone, Out There, might be having... FUN!)
mark
I skimmed the first dozen or two comment threads, and this *ain't* slashdot like it was 10 years ago.
Lessee, for one, I gather not one of you know what the phrase comes from.
For another, it seems to have been expanded beyond how close we are to the end - and I think 90% of you have ZERO idea what it's like to live when a crisis could result in everything beyond roaches living on Twinkies being dead in an hour or two.
And the assholes, esp. the Republicans and the neoConfederate "Tea Party"ists who have no interest in securing what's left of the old Soviet Union's arsenal that wound up outside of Russia. Or the effects of global warming on food production, or water.
*sigh*
Instead I see a thread going on about healthcare, instead of the actual subject of the post.
mark "you want a simple, cheap answer for healthcare? Create a national health system like
the UK's, and have doctors work for *it* at a fixed, civil service salary, and screw
the medical insurance companies, like they'd done us for decades"
For one, the folks who "invented" the iPotty need to give away their weapons, their cars, all of their possessions, and let themselves be checked into an assisted living facility, since they're obviously too *STUPID* to live on their own.
None of them have children, either.
Y'know, I bet they don't offer, in the device's warranty, to replace all the iPhones that somewhere between 10% and 25% of the two year olds will throw *into* the potty.
And quality? It's a well-known bit of history (at least among folks who work on their own cars) that around 1925 Henry Ford, the original, sent men to junkyards, to find out what parts of the Model T hadn't worn out, and then had the parts for the new Model A made more cheaply, so they'd wear out sooner.
mark "we won't begin to talk about what you do when your smart house has the blue screen of death"
So, set up an hour or two, maybe even pull in one or two other experienced people, and do a code review on some of the stuff he's complaining about. Listen to him, then explain why it's that way, and what he's learning in school is not necessarily correct for the real world.
Oh, and I'd look at something he wrote, for things like parameter validation and error handling....
mark
I just skimmed a bunch of posts, and I'm wondering if more than 0.1% of you actually read any of the articles about it.
Let's see: it noted lack of access to medical care in mostly the below-median-income (i.e, half the country), due to cost.
But let's not create, say, a national medical system, like the UK's NHS, where they're all on salary, and so have no incentive to push all the newest, most expensive of everything, including what the drug co salesman left them samples of. No, we'd rather spend 25% to 75% or more of our medical dollars for multinational profits, as opposed to healthcare.
Oh, that's right, there was also an article I read yesterday, about a study showing that for-profit hospitals gave, overwhelmingly, worse care than non-profit, due to cost-cutting measures like fewer staff, and less one-on-one staff/patient care.
mark