It's always best to use the best language for the job and far to many Java or.NET shops will use Java and.NET for everything even when there are much better tools...
One reason for doing this is that you don't have to specialize maintenance. If you have five Java guys, and only one of them is facile in say, Perl, it may make perfectly good sense to use Java for everything, so that any of your team can maintain it, even though Perl is a better choice for writing, say, filter programs. Now, I'd rather have the folks learn Perl, too, but I understand and accept the rationale.
Well, if they know what they are doing. If the company is new, there's at least even money that the sales and marketing folks are stupid.
I have always worked hard to partner with Sales. Unfortunately, the distribution of good sales people is similar to the distribution of good developers. There is a lot of sifting to be done.
No, I mean constraints because you can't run a control. It's pretty hard to test both branches of a hypothesis, so you're left with after the fact analysis. Also, economists are rarely in a position to direct policy. They usually just get to write columns about it in the NYT and WSJ.
But some of these perceptions are misplaced, there are issues that science cannot solve. And to me this is clearly one.
And there, we simply differ in our perceptions. C'est la vie.
But with electronic voting machines there's nothing for the candidate representatives or myself to verify. No way to know if the machines have been rigged or not.
That is an assertion, not a fact, and it's truth depends on the characteristics of a given implementation. The Brazilians think they have ways. I'd like to know more about that.
No argument from me. That's essentially the point I was trying to make. It's possible to be scientific about economics, but it's hard because of the constraints.
Well, I don't think it's faith. It's a general perception that we generally are able to solve hard problems, of which this seems to be one. As I said before, I'll be curious to observe the Brazilian experience.
BTW, you -cannot- and do not verify the paper process. We as a society might be able to, but for individuals, it's exactly the same problem. Who follows the ballot box? Who has transparent ballot boxes? Who is at the polling place at opening to check that it's empty? Who runs sample ballots through to see if they are correctly tabulated?
We are using faith just as much in the paper approach, and that faith has been shown to be misplaced. The size of the set of people that know how to manipulate the paper process is larger than the size of the set of people that have the competence to screw with an electronic process.
Nope. Gay marriage is a personal privacy issue. Screw who you want to. Abortion is a personal privacy issue, and a societal choice about the worth of one individual over another. It you accept that society can allow capital punishment, and sending people to war to get killed, then it's inconsistent to say that we can't allow killing of fetuses, which I acknowledge are people, too. But it's a choice of maximizing potential for a realized person against that of an unrealized person.
Finally, I don't believe in making laws out of religious teachings, which means that most of the current crop of conservatives' exhortations don't work for me. If the Bible is valid, then so is the Koran, the Torah, and the teachings of Buddha. These are inconsitent, so you can't use any of them, and you have to think from first principles, which our current crop don't like to do. Think, that is.
Well, I liked McCain in 2000, but not recently, for all the obvious reasons. There haven't been many candidates I have cared for in a while, though I confess that Obama sounded sensible for a while, before he started having to promise everything to everybody. I'll vote for Obama.
I'm tired of politicians trying to sound like they are the same as the guy sitting next to me at a bar. When my pipe leaks, I want a plumber, not a drinking buddy. I don't care if the plumber has kooky friends or sleeps with his apprentice, I care if he knows how to fix leaks. It's the same with my government. I want someone who knows how nations work, who understands history, and who is both educated and experienced and knows how to use other people with education and experience. I want him to be different from and better than me in these areas, and I don't care if he smoked pot in college (or last week) or if some people he has been connected with have unrelated flaws.
My point exactly. I didn't vote for him. I voted for his dad, twice. I didn't mind Clinton too much. I hope GW kills any chance for the current crop of so called conservatives for the next 20 years.
While Reagan was in office, but against his strenuous complaints, Paul Volcker did succeed in controlling the growth of the money supply, which reigned in inflation and probably stimulated the stock market. Reagan took credit for it, but the truth is he fought Volcker and the Fed every inch of the way. Ironically, Carter appointed Volcker, who basically cured the inflation that was plaguing the country.
The issue with economics as a science is that it is very difficult to conduct experiments. The methodology and math is fine, and there are plenty of folks who work hard to be rigorous, but you fundamentally can't take one United States, and hold the money supply constant, and take another and allow the money supply to grow. As such, you are limited to after the fact analysis, often comparing situations that aren't strictly alike.
Is this science? I don't know that we need to measure the angels on the head of that pin. Is it important, and susceptible to thoughtful study? I hope we all agree that it is.
I studied econ in college, and am of the opinion that it is not possible to make educated political decisions without a solid understanding of macro and micro economics. Political history is rich with examples. Take the hyperinflation in various world economies, for example. Knowing what happened in Argentina, Mexico, pre-revolutionary France, and pre WWII Germany, I'll tell you this, now. The US is likely to undergo serious, double digit inflation for several years, in the next ten years, because printing money is the only way the US government can work its way out from under the debt and entitlement burdens we are taking on. Is it science that underlies this conclusion? Or is it just history, analysis, and a theory of the relationship between the money supply, interest rates and price levels? If I am right, does this become an experiment, and thus make econ science?
I don't really care, but I'll tell you that I'm not investing in bonds or other dollar denominated investments.
Well, there are subjective inputs to the conclusions drawn. For example, you can conclude that there is a tendency for capital to accumulate, and that the marginal utility of the billionth dollar is lower than that of the first, those you can draw from math. Where it gets subjective is when you then conclude that it makes sense to tax rich people at a higher rate because of the declining marginal utility of money.
Likewise, history shows that there is always a poor class that suffers. It's a subjective choice that we make how to deal with that information.
Thank you. I am moderately conservative, in the old Goldwater sense. I, and many like me, want nothing to do with that hatemongering lying bastards that have taken over the label of 'conservative'. 'Conservative' used to mean wanting incremental, cautious change, keeping what works, and being cautious about expanding the mission of government.
The label conservative, these days, means 'radical religious nationalist'. It has nothing to do with the traditional ethos of small government and individual freedoms.
Changing the subject slightly, I will note that I agree with Krugman more often than I disagree, and I think that a lot of careful economic analysis shows that more governmental intervention may be in the best interests of most of society. I would like to see us cautiously move in this direction.
Receipts and bank statements are precisely what keeps banks honest. They know people can and do independently verify their contents and will catch them if they start stealing money from the accounts. But for an election you do not know what the result will be in advance and you cannot independently verify that it is correct.
I agree that verification is required. What I don't agree with is that it cannot be achieved. It's a hard problem, to be sure. But why not try to solve it, rather than pouting and stamping our feet, insisting that it simply can't be done? Why not specify requirements for a solution, as we would have people do to us?
I'll be curious to observe our Brazilian friends and watch what their results are. They will certainly be educational for all of us.
I like your thinking, but as expressed, this would let everyone check everyone else's vote, if they can get the same information about the other person. You have to have some really private info as part of this.
E-voting has a huge potential for general issues that make the rigging of a whole national election possible.
Which makes it different from paper voting exactly how? Paper voting has been manipulated in the US for years (cf. Chicago, Florida and Ohio) and has very recently fucked us over egregiously, leading to the catastrophe that is the US government today.
I don't think e-voting is magic by any means, but I also don't see any reason to doubt that it can be made reasonably resilient and trustworthy. Like any other system that controls a resource of value, you need checks and controls. This is exactly the same issue as running bank accounts on paper vs bank accounts on machines, which is a solved problem. Used an ATM lately? Then you agree that distributed hardware with unattended public access is reasonably safe. You get a receipt, but when was the last time you ever had to make use of it to make sure that your transaction was correct? E-voting has the potential to be -more- transparent than paper voting, because of the immediacy of review that would be possible.
The real issue isn't e-voting per se, it is whether any organization can be developed that is competent enough and trustworthy enough to put a solid system into place. In the US, we have seen that partisan officials can get in and fuck with paper voting systems more than well enough to affect elections. THAT is our real problem.
Yes, but if 20% don't vaccinate, you start materially affecting things. The issue I have with this particular issue is that it has been studied pretty carefully, and a certain group of folks are choosing to not believe the results of the studies, which indicate that there is no risk.
Your words, "perceived risk" are interesting, because that is what the issue appears to be. With thimerserol (sp), the concern is a link to autism, which has been studied to death. If there is a link, it can't be detected with statistics, and yet, people are refusing to vaccinate because of a 'perceived' risk.
The transcripts from the recent Supreme Court 2nd amendment case do not support this assertion. The testimony, and the historical precedents that they cited from the time, make it clear that the topic under discussion by our forefathers was the rights of a citizen militia to be armed in contemplation of resistance of a tyrannical government.
Don't bother. this never seems to get through to people.
True, but the other side of this also seems to get lost.
An unauthorized download isn't necessarily a lost sale, but it -is- an appropriation of value by the downloader. If you take something that isn't yours, and which the rightful owner doesn't want you to have without paying, a theft has happened, regardless of the legalese, and regardless of whether you cost the rightful owner anything.
However, I believe not vaccinating your children, if your well intentioned but ignorant, is not bad parenting.
It may not be bad parenting, but it's potentially dangerous to society. The issue with parents not vaccinating is that it adds to the danger of the population at large. Which, in my view, opens to door to discussion of governmental regulation.
Slashdot Mirror
It's always best to use the best language for the job and far to many Java or .NET shops will use Java and .NET for everything even when there are much better tools...
One reason for doing this is that you don't have to specialize maintenance. If you have five Java guys, and only one of them is facile in say, Perl, it may make perfectly good sense to use Java for everything, so that any of your team can maintain it, even though Perl is a better choice for writing, say, filter programs. Now, I'd rather have the folks learn Perl, too, but I understand and accept the rationale.
Bingo. Mod parent up.
Yeah, whatever...
Well, if they know what they are doing. If the company is new, there's at least even money that the sales and marketing folks are stupid.
I have always worked hard to partner with Sales. Unfortunately, the distribution of good sales people is similar to the distribution of good developers. There is a lot of sifting to be done.
I thought was version 3.0...
No, I mean constraints because you can't run a control. It's pretty hard to test both branches of a hypothesis, so you're left with after the fact analysis. Also, economists are rarely in a position to direct policy. They usually just get to write columns about it in the NYT and WSJ.
But some of these perceptions are misplaced, there are issues that science cannot solve. And to me this is clearly one.
And there, we simply differ in our perceptions. C'est la vie.
But with electronic voting machines there's nothing for the candidate representatives or myself to verify. No way to know if the machines have been rigged or not.
That is an assertion, not a fact, and it's truth depends on the characteristics of a given implementation. The Brazilians think they have ways. I'd like to know more about that.
No argument from me. That's essentially the point I was trying to make. It's possible to be scientific about economics, but it's hard because of the constraints.
Well, I don't think it's faith. It's a general perception that we generally are able to solve hard problems, of which this seems to be one. As I said before, I'll be curious to observe the Brazilian experience.
BTW, you -cannot- and do not verify the paper process. We as a society might be able to, but for individuals, it's exactly the same problem. Who follows the ballot box? Who has transparent ballot boxes? Who is at the polling place at opening to check that it's empty? Who runs sample ballots through to see if they are correctly tabulated?
We are using faith just as much in the paper approach, and that faith has been shown to be misplaced. The size of the set of people that know how to manipulate the paper process is larger than the size of the set of people that have the competence to screw with an electronic process.
Yeah, but the libertarians are generally nutcases when it comes to economics. The free market causes a lot of societal pain if left untended.
Nope. Gay marriage is a personal privacy issue. Screw who you want to. Abortion is a personal privacy issue, and a societal choice about the worth of one individual over another. It you accept that society can allow capital punishment, and sending people to war to get killed, then it's inconsistent to say that we can't allow killing of fetuses, which I acknowledge are people, too. But it's a choice of maximizing potential for a realized person against that of an unrealized person.
Finally, I don't believe in making laws out of religious teachings, which means that most of the current crop of conservatives' exhortations don't work for me. If the Bible is valid, then so is the Koran, the Torah, and the teachings of Buddha. These are inconsitent, so you can't use any of them, and you have to think from first principles, which our current crop don't like to do. Think, that is.
Well, I liked McCain in 2000, but not recently, for all the obvious reasons. There haven't been many candidates I have cared for in a while, though I confess that Obama sounded sensible for a while, before he started having to promise everything to everybody. I'll vote for Obama.
I'm tired of politicians trying to sound like they are the same as the guy sitting next to me at a bar. When my pipe leaks, I want a plumber, not a drinking buddy. I don't care if the plumber has kooky friends or sleeps with his apprentice, I care if he knows how to fix leaks. It's the same with my government. I want someone who knows how nations work, who understands history, and who is both educated and experienced and knows how to use other people with education and experience. I want him to be different from and better than me in these areas, and I don't care if he smoked pot in college (or last week) or if some people he has been connected with have unrelated flaws.
Just to be clear, I like your idea.
My point exactly. I didn't vote for him. I voted for his dad, twice. I didn't mind Clinton too much. I hope GW kills any chance for the current crop of so called conservatives for the next 20 years.
While Reagan was in office, but against his strenuous complaints, Paul Volcker did succeed in controlling the growth of the money supply, which reigned in inflation and probably stimulated the stock market. Reagan took credit for it, but the truth is he fought Volcker and the Fed every inch of the way. Ironically, Carter appointed Volcker, who basically cured the inflation that was plaguing the country.
The issue with economics as a science is that it is very difficult to conduct experiments. The methodology and math is fine, and there are plenty of folks who work hard to be rigorous, but you fundamentally can't take one United States, and hold the money supply constant, and take another and allow the money supply to grow. As such, you are limited to after the fact analysis, often comparing situations that aren't strictly alike.
Is this science? I don't know that we need to measure the angels on the head of that pin. Is it important, and susceptible to thoughtful study? I hope we all agree that it is.
I studied econ in college, and am of the opinion that it is not possible to make educated political decisions without a solid understanding of macro and micro economics. Political history is rich with examples. Take the hyperinflation in various world economies, for example. Knowing what happened in Argentina, Mexico, pre-revolutionary France, and pre WWII Germany, I'll tell you this, now. The US is likely to undergo serious, double digit inflation for several years, in the next ten years, because printing money is the only way the US government can work its way out from under the debt and entitlement burdens we are taking on. Is it science that underlies this conclusion? Or is it just history, analysis, and a theory of the relationship between the money supply, interest rates and price levels? If I am right, does this become an experiment, and thus make econ science?
I don't really care, but I'll tell you that I'm not investing in bonds or other dollar denominated investments.
Well, there are subjective inputs to the conclusions drawn. For example, you can conclude that there is a tendency for capital to accumulate, and that the marginal utility of the billionth dollar is lower than that of the first, those you can draw from math. Where it gets subjective is when you then conclude that it makes sense to tax rich people at a higher rate because of the declining marginal utility of money.
Likewise, history shows that there is always a poor class that suffers. It's a subjective choice that we make how to deal with that information.
Thank you. I am moderately conservative, in the old Goldwater sense. I, and many like me, want nothing to do with that hatemongering lying bastards that have taken over the label of 'conservative'. 'Conservative' used to mean wanting incremental, cautious change, keeping what works, and being cautious about expanding the mission of government.
The label conservative, these days, means 'radical religious nationalist'. It has nothing to do with the traditional ethos of small government and individual freedoms.
Changing the subject slightly, I will note that I agree with Krugman more often than I disagree, and I think that a lot of careful economic analysis shows that more governmental intervention may be in the best interests of most of society. I would like to see us cautiously move in this direction.
Receipts and bank statements are precisely what keeps banks honest. They know people can and do independently verify their contents and will catch them if they start stealing money from the accounts. But for an election you do not know what the result will be in advance and you cannot independently verify that it is correct.
I agree that verification is required. What I don't agree with is that it cannot be achieved. It's a hard problem, to be sure. But why not try to solve it, rather than pouting and stamping our feet, insisting that it simply can't be done? Why not specify requirements for a solution, as we would have people do to us?
I'll be curious to observe our Brazilian friends and watch what their results are. They will certainly be educational for all of us.
I like your thinking, but as expressed, this would let everyone check everyone else's vote, if they can get the same information about the other person. You have to have some really private info as part of this.
Wait, what about a password?
Can I get a patent for this?
E-voting has a huge potential for general issues that make the rigging of a whole national election possible.
Which makes it different from paper voting exactly how? Paper voting has been manipulated in the US for years (cf. Chicago, Florida and Ohio) and has very recently fucked us over egregiously, leading to the catastrophe that is the US government today.
I don't think e-voting is magic by any means, but I also don't see any reason to doubt that it can be made reasonably resilient and trustworthy. Like any other system that controls a resource of value, you need checks and controls. This is exactly the same issue as running bank accounts on paper vs bank accounts on machines, which is a solved problem. Used an ATM lately? Then you agree that distributed hardware with unattended public access is reasonably safe. You get a receipt, but when was the last time you ever had to make use of it to make sure that your transaction was correct? E-voting has the potential to be -more- transparent than paper voting, because of the immediacy of review that would be possible.
The real issue isn't e-voting per se, it is whether any organization can be developed that is competent enough and trustworthy enough to put a solid system into place. In the US, we have seen that partisan officials can get in and fuck with paper voting systems more than well enough to affect elections. THAT is our real problem.
Yes, but if 20% don't vaccinate, you start materially affecting things. The issue I have with this particular issue is that it has been studied pretty carefully, and a certain group of folks are choosing to not believe the results of the studies, which indicate that there is no risk.
Your words, "perceived risk" are interesting, because that is what the issue appears to be. With thimerserol (sp), the concern is a link to autism, which has been studied to death. If there is a link, it can't be detected with statistics, and yet, people are refusing to vaccinate because of a 'perceived' risk.
The transcripts from the recent Supreme Court 2nd amendment case do not support this assertion. The testimony, and the historical precedents that they cited from the time, make it clear that the topic under discussion by our forefathers was the rights of a citizen militia to be armed in contemplation of resistance of a tyrannical government.
Don't bother. this never seems to get through to people.
True, but the other side of this also seems to get lost.
An unauthorized download isn't necessarily a lost sale, but it -is- an appropriation of value by the downloader. If you take something that isn't yours, and which the rightful owner doesn't want you to have without paying, a theft has happened, regardless of the legalese, and regardless of whether you cost the rightful owner anything.
However, I believe not vaccinating your children, if your well intentioned but ignorant, is not bad parenting.
It may not be bad parenting, but it's potentially dangerous to society. The issue with parents not vaccinating is that it adds to the danger of the population at large. Which, in my view, opens to door to discussion of governmental regulation.