Actually, the argument that an arbitrarily advanced society doesn't need "resources" is silly.
All work requires energy. Any advanced alien race is constantly expending energy.
_The_ source of energy in the universe is star fusion. Convertible energy is radiated out from stars at a rate proportional to the size and lifecycle phase of the star, and the collector efficiency & distance from that star.
IOW, the amount of work an advanced society could do, under normal circumstances, would be limited by how much star energy they could capture and utilize, and that in turn, would be limited by the power output of nearby stars, and how close they stayed to any given star.
So you have a fairly limiting energy problem, that is frankly an artificial constraint.
Here's why: all _energy_ comes from star radiation, all non-star _matter_ is a form of energy storage. By exploiting resources, be they asteroids or planets or anything else.. in "matter" form.. a civlization can consume energy at a higher rate than the local star output.. and at a further distance away from a near-by producing star.
IOW, the consumption of non-radiated-energyresources enables _faster_ travel or _further_ travel. While there may be some _very_ old space-faring society that has realized the "peak entropy" problem and now voluntarily limits itself to consuming energy at the average star-dissapation rate... younger space faring races would not necessarily conform to this self-imposition, and would consume matter -- nature's energy storage batteries -- to fuel their ambitions.
Assuming you beleive in this dichotemy: the advanced society which artificially limits its energy consumption (and therefore growth), and the transitional society which does not, which is more likely to make an exploratory trip towards Earth? I contend that a society which has written off further expansion does not actively seek to do more exploration.
So, if we meet somebody, oods are, they consume matter to acheive their goals. We cannot predict which forms of matter are most amenable to their technology and needs, but we can probably assume that they aren't going to park in Solar orbit and just "hang out" until they've soaked up enough rays in "Trickle charge" mode to continue about their business. Not when there is all this matter diversity nearby that they could exploit.
I'm not saying that they'll see earth, and say, "Yes!! Finally!! Brocoli!" But they may very well say "look! oxygen [the universal propellant oxidizer for chemical propulsion] exists in all 3 forms of matter on the blue planet."
Or maybe space faring societies, upon seeing a small rocky planet with a gooey core made of molten ferrous liquid... get the same ideas we do when we see a crust deposit of black long-chain hydrocarbon liquid..
It is only expensive because of the NIMBY crowd and the ear of government that they have.
The government has completely raped the nuclear power industry. There's no free market involved. What is there for the market to sort out?
PS: CO2 emissions are irrelevant. Bringing up Co2 makes you lose credibility. All people concerned about Co2 should stop exhaling. That would solve many of the worlds problems simultaneously.
The reasons to do fission power are numerous; fewer _actual_ pollutants is just one of them.
I've walked through a nuke plant that got stopped during construction because of stupid people. It's depressing. It's like living inside of "Atlas Shrugged", where you see that the stupidest, least worthwhile elements of society are destroying everything worth glorifying about America... engineering, science, progress, entrepreneurship, etc.
In summary, I would be willing to take a huge pay cut if my job was to spend 40 hrs/week driving a road grater over the sub-humans who cock-block nuclear power in this country.
I've largely abandoned the use of credit cards, although I retain them for fast access to flexible spending power.
But I view the return to a cash-in-hand lifestyle as a half-way point to what I suspect is coming; a goods/barter/specie-currency based economy.
The US Dollar will crash, probably within the next 5 years. When that happens, I won't be fully self sufficient, and I'll want to trade with other people, and I'll need something I can use to do that. The most likely form of post-collapse money will be 22LR ammunition.
We went to Europe a few years ago without having a sufficient amount of cash with us. There were a lot of things we were locked out of doing until we were able to get credit-card cash advances in local currency. I was surprised at how non-credit oriented many places in Germany were.
It's a harrowing feeling: "your money isn't good here".
I suspect that most Americans will get to experience that in their own grocery store before too much longer.
A random metal is no more/less intrinsically valuable than random pieces of specially printed paper or of little black pixels in the shape of numbers on my bank's website.
Of course. But a random bit of metal is much harder to create out of thin air, and thus it is much better insulated against the problem of currency inflation.
Currency inflation is the problem. It is what makes the USD and indeed the US economy a bit of a prisoners dilemma. If you attempt to store your wealth in US dollars, you will find that over time, the value of that wealth approaches zero. This is due entirely to the inflation of the monetary base. This inflation is something which you do not control, and which legally you cannot opt-out of.
So the US economy requires that everyone who wants to merely keep their head "above water" finds places to put their USD denominated wealth such that it pays interest at at least the natural rate of inflation. But of course, putting your money into a fractional reserve bank may pay interest, but it also inflates the money supply. So you don't really win there.
Refusing to "play the game" means you lose, and "playing the game" from a weakened position [i.e. without the collusion of th government in maintaining a monopoly, or avoiding fraud prosecution, etc] means that you will also usually lose.
So due to the tremendous ease with which new dollars are created, and the legal tender laws which make it illegal for you to REFUSE to participate in this game, you and most people will continue to lose, as they are continually worked literally _to death_ to just keep their head above water, wealth-wise.
Of course, rows in some database are even easier to inflate than paper bills. And infact, much of the actual growth of the supply of dollars is just that: "electronic" dollars.
Having a specie based money and a strong discouragement towards paper instruments lets you avoid the insiduous destruction of inflation. And private actors _could_ do that now, but they'd be outside of the protections of government and society. Indeed, if they did it "too much", they'd become the prey of government agencies who don't fancy having their power and authority challenged.
There's nothing special about Gold. It's just that, for a number of very practical reasons, precious metals are a very good choice for a curency. Assaying precious metals is more uniform, than say, assaying cows. And cutting and recombining different fractions of whole cows is much messier, and considerably damages the value of your cow. Inert metals can be melted and cut and recombined and reminted essentially indefinitely.
When it becomes possible to cheaply inflate the supply of Gold, gold will become a very poor store of wealth and medium of exchange. But until then, when individuals are allowed to freely choose what they'd like to use as a store of wealth and a medium of exchange, Gold and Silver invariably are what they choose. THe reasons have little to do with any widely-held value assessment of gold, and instead have much to do with the practical utility of precious metals, for the reasons I discuss above.
I wish someone would make "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" into a film [without wrecking its message], and release it in US theaters on July 4.
And then I wish that the people who watched it would actually think about what they had seen. And it would be even nicer if the extent of their reaction went past "just thinking about it".
Re:This just in!
on
The Apple Two
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· Score: 1, Troll
A personal computer is a computer that _does what you want it to do._ For a shockingly large number of people, Apple's present product line does exactly that, which explains their present high popularity and booming market share, especially among consumer media devices
I wonder if the next generation of Apple Personal Computers can deliver what their customers want today -- namely, the sense of smug superiority and being set apart for having the priviledge of overpaying for a name and some self-righteous packaging that advertises where something was _Designed_ [in california, no less], as if that had any bearing on its fitness for any objective purpose...
Yes.. I wonder if in the near future, Jobs and Apple will be able to deliver that without actually putting any electronics in the machine at all...
Will it still be a personal computer, since it does what its buyers want?
I see a business opportunity, btw. Selling Apple laptop "skins" that either - cover up some other brand of computer - don't contain a computer at all. The skin is just that - you just sit somewhere in public, with a laptop-looking-thing open, proudly showing the apple logo to all who pretend to not be looking at your glorious presence.
With a fake-Apple skin over your laptop, Onlookers will see that you are better than they are, and will forgive you for spending 2 hours fucking with your hair all to make it look like you didn't spend any time on it. They'll want to sit down and ask you what important work you're doing, but be too threatened because your Apple Skin -- hey, the name of the product will be called "Apple Peel" -- your Apple Peel clad-device will put an impenetrable psychological distance between you, the annointed, and them, the plebians. And so they will remain standoffish and contemptuous, and at least in this little microcosm of the stifled social dynamics of the wifi coffee-shop, you will emerge victorious.
Apple Peel (C) -- the apple-branded covering for your affordable and functional laptop. All of the social superiority, none of the overpriced shittyness of an actual apple product.
The story blurb is of course ridiculous but i think you are downplaying the extent to which software/system vulnerabilities will be a factor in future conflicts. Especially due to the assymetrical, break once, break everywhere dynamics of attacking widely deployed IT.
I'm not sure who the US will use this against, but I suspect many people will be able to use IT attacks against the US. And it's going to be terribly effective, because getting new IT created, tested, deployed, and humans trained on how to run it, takes us a lot of time and money. But once some guy figures out how to break it... usually it's broken everywhere at once.
IOW: attacking the US's use of IT is going to be a force multiplier for people that don't like us. And they'll probably be able to do it on the cheap. Whatever they cannot figure out themselves, they can pay someone $5-$50k in Russia to figure out how to do for them.
I've heard that for a long time, ground-to-sat control signals weren't authenticated or encrypted. For a long time, screwing with Uncle Sam was kind of a "security through obscurity" sort of affair, but the clock has pretty much run down on that concept; seeing what kind of successful attacks are waged will be interesting.
Suppose for the sake of argument that some GPS-guidance system were using an off the shelf receiver that had support for the D-GPS standard [the stuff where a terrestrial signal is used to enhance accuracy]. Even though the military can use the "military grade" GPS, more and more work is getting accompolished using consumer receivers, so its only natural to assume that some may have this "local radio" feature that i seem to remember.
So what's to stop someone who has a factory he doesn't want getting blown up to introduce a huge "correction" offset into the local signal. Perhaps you can misdirect people and potentially munitions [not aware of any GPS guided munitions though].
Or suppose that our ground units aren't using encrypted comms all the time? suppose you've got a radio listener that records everything it hears, and correlates that with times, channels, etc. Some association rule mining and you have gleaned a working model of who is using the radio when, and what they are saying. Now you decide to start playing back the audio you previously recorded, and for some amount of time, everyone using radios is _really_ confused. Maybe you even call in a false operation or movement. Maybe you convince the US to bomb an orphanage by giving a _very_ authentic sounding (you just replay Private Pyle's voice, after all) request for ordinance at coordinates you control.
The weak link in all of these computer-aided decision systems is that humans beleive them when they shouldn't, and that humans don't do enough to protect them from tampering. rather than some kind of magic wave [which could very well work, for instance by somehow distrurbing the small gyroscopes that inertial nav systems use... but again, that would be ANTI aircraft instead of launched from aircraft], figuring out how to mis-use the technology to cause problems for the humans will be where successfull attacks come from.
If I were going to try and wreck the superior tech advantages of the US military, I'd start by understanding the sensor inputs to the machines that do the thinking. Are laser guided munitions effective in heavy fog or other light-attenuation situations? Can i build goggles that let me see where directed laser energy is currently lighting things up? If so, i can predict targets. If i have boots on the ground near the target, i can find out exactly where the illuminator is positioned (by placing a sheet 10m infront of hte target and working it through a range of motion to see when i am/am not illuminated). If i use several of my own laser designators, can I re-direct a laser-seeking munitions head?
The professionals have been playing war games a lot longer that I've been writing slashdot posts. But I know from an entire lifetime of working with software that there will always be bugs, and humans will beleive the machine when they shouldn't.
So I work for Microsoft.. most hated software company, right?
Not always, apparently. Thanks to competition like Adobe, we're going to have to up our game.
Without going into too many details, a friend of mine was a Microsoft developer that was in a position where he was trading email with an extenal ISV as part of a formal MS program. So there was this stream of question and answer emails between them about how to use what we were working on to address this ISV's particular business problems. Anyway, at the end of one of this ISV's emails back to us, he says
"PS: Can you guys somehow crush Adobe Corporation? I honesly and truly hate them."
So there you go. That day, we lost. Adobe was the more hated company. We resolved to work harder to be #1 again.
Cars of today nearly universally have faster acceleration than cars of any previous decade. Power, torque, weight, gearing, and aerodynamics, as well as low internal resistance all contribute in various ways, depending on which specific cars you are comparing. But the trend is unmistakable: todays cars are much faster. Anecdote: My Minivan has more horsepower than my 1st generation BMW M5.
Traction really hasn't changed on any sort of high speed road, its far better on poorly made roads as the components react better, but on an Interstate theres not really much of a difference
This is also false. The tires of today are absolutely amazing compared to rubber of just a few years ago. The suspensions of todays cars are considerably more advanced -- meaning they maintain effective tire adhesion in more sorts of circumstances. Todays cars control air flow much better than older cars -- it is uncommon for cars to have significant lift at highway speeds today, which was a serious safety hazard on older designs.
The brake system performance of the last 20 years are amazing compared to the pre-1980s stuff. The change away from asbestos drum linings to modern pad compounds and 4-wheel discs, and the introduction of ABS has really done wonders for stopping distances, fade resistance, and controllability in panic maneuvers.
Today I was driving on an empty stretch of curvy road in my prepared track car, a 1987 BMW 325. I was driving on bad street tires, but none the less, I checked my speeds at apex and before the final braking zone. My 2007 Audi station wagon shows a higher apex speed and a higher terminal speed through the same stretch of road, and it is still running my snow tires. It is about 800 lbs heavier and only has 30 more horse power, and unlike my much lighter BMW, the A4 gets 30mpg reliably on highways. That's fantastic performance out of a daily-driven family car.
The cars of today are truly amazing compared to those of even 20 years ago. I love older cars just as much as the next car guy, but they are uncompetitive, even against their newer, much heavier brethren. True, the margin of performance difference between new and old cars is often eclipsed by the breadth of driver-talent difference amongst the respective drivers, and so occasionally old cars win races against newer ones.
Also, the passive safety of todays vehicles is absolutely amazing: look at the technical data on iihs.org for details.
Drivers also have better opportunities to become better, safer drivers than ever before. The assertion that drivers aren't getting any better may or may not be true in the common case [i wasn't rating drivers 40 years ago], but the training available to drivers today who want to take it is fantastic.
I've personally taught teens, as part of the "Street Survival Program", car control and panic-avoidance techniques that you had to go to a racing instruction school to learn as recently as 10 years ago [which is where I learned them].
For those who wish to excel, now is a better time than ever to become a car pilot.
Incidents at these levels are fairly isolated, but low level bullying is a part of life. Part of the reason to go to school is to learn how to deal with the idiots you will always have around you. It doesn't end with school, they exist in all areas of society, including the workplace. Office politics can be just a more cerebral version of the bullying.
This is what people often say, as a criticism of homeschooling.
I have carefully arranged my life so that I don't ever deal with anyone I don't like dealing with. I work at a company with a very high hiring bar such that I _never_ deal with people who are stupid _and_ assholes.
Real life is nothing like school. In the real world, when I don't like someone, I don't invite them to my house. If they insist that they can bother me even after I've retreated to my home, I get to shoot them -- a decidedly righteous outcome. I don't have to let people in my car, I don't have to talk to them, I don't have to answer my phone. Hell, I can shop at private businesses that are members only affairs, and the necessity of interacting with people to even do commerce is all but antiquated at this point.
In my entire existance, I can make what I do, where I do it, and whom may be present while it is done entirely according to my liking. The unifying factor here is money, and the key thing I learned from public schools is that once someone has money, one never has to deal with anything unpleasant.
The only exception to any of this is the government. Only they have the power to coerce me; the government is the only entity where I _MUST_ deal with them on their terms instead of on my own.
Given what I had to put up with in public schools, it is no surprise that I am a libertarian/minarchist, and that my children will be homeschooled. What I cannot understand is that anyone could honestly come to any _other_ conclusion. I mean, I think you are arguing that getting the shit beat out of you and being forbidden from defending yourself is "good" for people; something all kids should experience.
Well, instead of learning that much of life is about being the punching bag for the socially favored classes, my children will learn marksmanship.
That's honestly amazing. If you were a woman today with a fertility problem such that you needed an egg retreival done from your own body, for your own use, and were paying 100% out of pocket.. it would cost you under $8k for the entire procedure and medicines. Additional stuff [like doing an IVF fertilization and re-inserting an embryo] would cost more, of course.
So the high price offered for donor eggs must be attributed to the following: - the tremendous invasiveness of the procedure, to be borne by someone with no non-financial stake in the process - the desirability and scarcity of your "high quality" donor eggs. - any part of the contract that has a performance guarantee, i.e. they will keep doing egg retreivals on you until "they" are satisfied, and all of this is covered under the original agreed price
The funny thing about the donor egg market is that people ought to be looking at _your_ mom as an additional fitness indicator: IIRC, all of your immature egg cells were present when you were in-utero.
I wonder if anyone pays 100k for "Ivy League daughter of an Ivy League Daughter":)
What part of the procedure made you uninterested? I'm familiar with what's involved [see: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1599004&cid=31661810 ] but 35k is an awful lot of seed cash to pass up if you are going to finish school debt free [which I'd hope, given your academic performance].
I am trying to decide if you are being perfectly serious here and exactly on topic, or if this is a witty commentary on "dating" and the commoditization of women -- whereby men know what they are looking for and many talentend and intelligent women focus on leaving college with their Mrs. Degree, as it proves to be more profitable long-term than the diploma the university issues.
Specifically, the woman will typically be placed on an oral contraceptive that suppresses ovulation to "stabilize" her natural menstrual cycle. Then she will come off it at a known point so that her ovulation can be managed with about a 12 hour accuracy.
During this time, she will typically take drug that stimulates ovarian activity -- Follistim is common -- so that she produces multiple mature egg follicles during a single cycle. She'll typically have a few vaginal ultrasounds during the cycle to estabish follicle count and development. Finally, at the pointed time she'll take a dose of medicine that causes the eggs to be finished/matured/released. The following day she goes in for a procedure where a large syringe punctures the vaginal wall and retreives the eggs.
If you remember nothing else from this writeup, these are the key points: - woman takes a fuckton of ovary-exploding drugs - doctor puts enomrous syringe THROUGH THE SIDE OF THE VAGINA
From reading the blog post, I was surprised by the # of city staff and # of separate IT departments. From my time in munich [living there for 2 weeks, taking classes at BWS with my wife], I liked the city very much. However my impression is that Munich and surrounding areas that could be considered extensions of the city have a population of only 1M persons. Munich seemed very well developed for this size population, i.e. the u-bahn and s-bahn systems were very extensive and efficient [much better than Berlin, which contends still with re-unification].
Is my assessment of the population of Munich inaccurate? Does Munich have extra functions (perhaps from acting as a seat of government for Bavaria?) that this project is also addressing?
It seems like a large IT infrastructure with many employees and departments. For instance if there are 3000 desktops in use by city workers, on a population of 1m, there is a.3% ratio of humans to government desktops. What percentage of munich's population is a city government employee?
I was playing fast and loose with the age, and I don't see a nice excel chart of "90th percentile fetal viability by gestational week", but I'm at least as close as your notion of how long pregnancy _even lasts_.
The literature is pretty unambiguous about the following: premature babies with low birth weights have considerably higher outcomes when they have access to better NICU and pre-delivery technology. The survivability and zero-defect percentages get higher and higher and the gestational viability age creeps ever younger, as does the mass of viability.
That last link [the PDF] appears to be from the early 70s [based on guess]. It refers to no documented evidence of any infant surviving when born under 600g and before 24 weeks. The wikipedia link, refering to births in the 2003-2005 timeframe, pushes that to 21 weeks and _280g_.
You're trying to argue that medicine hasn't made significant advances in positive outcomes for low weight, early delivery babies since the 1950s.
You are objectively wrong. Don't misinform other slashdotters.
I'm against the healthcare bill, and I am not in the insurance industry, nor am I a right winger. I'm an anti-statist, which nobody seems to know what to do with [well, apart from "safely ignore":)].
Of course, I don't think much of what the federal government has done since the 1800s has been constitutional, so you can surmise where my most basic objections lie. Ideologically, this isn't the federal government's problem or business. It's actually illegal for them to be doing this. Of course, some people disagree, or some people just don't care what should or shouldn't be legal. Like the congress, for instance, or the previous administration's justice depatment, etc.
But then let's get to your HBR quotes.
- regarding infant mortality rate: the rest of the world measures it differently than we do. If a baby is born prematurely in europe and dies, it isn't counted in infant mortality statistics. Here, it is.
Let me tell you why the US health care system is incredible. I live in a smaller town, and I personally know of 2 babies born in the last 3 years at under 30 weeks gestation, who were delivered and treated in our local hospitals.
Those children are now _normal_. Approximately 25 years ago [and maybe even more recently], no baby born that early had _ever survived_. And now it is happening routinely, in small towns, to the children of "normal" people. Every few years, the youngest surviving baby gets younger. In this country, if my wife went into super-early labor at 25 weeks, they'd not only try to save our baby, but they'd have a good chance, and if they failed, they'd count that in "infant mortality".
On to the issue of overall life expectency: those statistics aren't corrected for murders and other violent deaths. The real news should have been "In the US, there are a lot of poor people and ethnic underclasses who like to kill each other and find other ways to die early.". They also aren't corrected for the obesity problem and the # of working hours and the per capita and aggregate productivity of the US. The average US worker works more hours and produces more wealth than in any other ecnomy. If you want to argue that we are working ourselves to death, that's fine, but I don't think of that as a problem with the quality of our care.
_Nobody_ leaves the US to get healthcare of a higher _quality_ elsewhere. _Some_ people leave the US to try and get care of a lower _cost_. But when money is no object, as it often is for foreign politicians, they seem to frequently leave their utopian state care systems behind and come here to get treated. That's the damning evidence that continues to argue that if you want the best, and you can pay, the US is the only place to get it and get it as soon as you want it.
Never, ever tell me what is in my best interest. I'll decide for myself. With gunfire, if you insist.
The second amendment is important. So are laws against cruelty to animals
Actually, the second amendment is the _most_ important because its the teeth in all of the rest of them. It is an _individual_ right, one which the ACLU _does not support_. I am not an ACLU hater, but I do wish they were a bit more... rationally grounded in their assessment of what our inalienable rights are. The constitution said it was one list. The ACLU uses a different list with some overlap.
Now, on to the issue of laws against animal cruelty: those are not only unimportant, they should be repealed.
See, animals don't have intrinsic rights, and even if they do, our constitution doesn't say so, and doesn't say that it was formed to protect those rights.
The entire breadth and scope of our government's rationale is the proection if the intrinsic rights of individuals, even against the desire of their neighbors to harm them via the power of majority.
Animals don't figure into this at all. Any law concerning animals needs to focus on property rights and food / safety issues. As long as it's your animal and your back yard and you're not spreading a pathogen into the local ecosystem, you should be able to electrocute your dogs balls or whatever other disgusting thing you want to do. Any laws to the contrary are ungrounded in objective reality. Our animal cruelty laws are nothing more than the result of most americans liking some animals more than others. Want to torture a worm? Nobody is going to stop you, but nobody can explain why the current laws SHOULD protect dogs but SHOULDN'T protect some of the other animals that currently aren't protected.
I love being the guy on slashdot that argues that torturing your own pets should be legal. It's not because i dislike animals, it's because all laws need to derive from self-consistent axioms, and nobody has articulated what those are as relates to protecting animals.
I know, asking for consistency in law and principles is pissing in the wind:)
Everytime _I_ buy something that says made in China, I think that the $1 that 13 year old girl got for making the logic board was $1 she didn't get by being a child prostitute. Or I think, that $1 will be better than the $0 she would have gotten doing subsistance farming and flood management, like her ancestors have done nearly unchanged for the last 6000 years.
The best way to lift the Chinese out of the mess they are in is the injection of outside capital, and the US has been playing a large role in that.
But that capital has to make its way into the hands of normal people. Government-to-government aid never does this, it's why our aid to Africa continues to prop up horrible governments and makes hte people worse, rather than better.
To the extent that us buying chinese made goods pays wages to the common man in China, that's a positive infusion of cash into that economy.
The rub, as you rightly point out, is the degree to which the government suppresses the inevitable desire for the newely emerging affluent and middle classes of Chinese to demand better conditions. When they come to see the government as an impediment between them and what is next, and have a history of work and accomplishment [and change] behind them, they will increasingly force the issue of improving their lot, both individually and collectively. And the government will have to continue to loosen its grip and respond if it wants to remain legitimate.
But the money has to be there first.
The US consumer is paying the way for China to become a free people and an economic super power.
The Vitamins example is interesting for two reasons. One, I'm a proponent of eliminating the FDA. The FDA sends a number of Americans to their graves every year by preventing people from experimenting with untested protocols that they and their doctors might be willing to try, having exhausted other options. Milton Friedman gives the FDA case special attention in "Free to Choose", and I think it's a good point that I certainly don't do justice to here.
For the benefit of people who might be reading this, let's be sure we're not mixing two issues. There is the issue of the fly-by-night drug maker developing a bad product, and then there is the issue of claiming something false.
Most people would assert that the FDA has taken over the role as gatekeeper of product quality, and under their care, lead-as-vitamins would not come to market. But this isn't the case. The procedures for avoiding FDA scrutiny are straightforward: simply claim that your product is not allowed to specify a health or medicinal purpose, and the FDA stays away. So we've got lead-vitamins on the shelves.
We have an information problem and a specialization problem as you point out: Joe can't be expected to do a careful study of every vitamin available to him. Who can? In the past, it was Joe's grocer who did this. Once upon a time, the retailer was an expert in the products he chose to stock, and he provided a very valuable service: keeping bad products off his shelves and away from his customers. Alas, the lack of owner/operator grocery stores [and owner/operator stores in general] has led to a decline in quality dynamic of retail transactions.
Today, there is still a buying manager that decides how to stock grocery shelves, but she is far away from the store where the product is puchased. I don't have any insight into how effective of a force for consumer good the modern, distant, _more_ specialized buyer is vs. the grocer of yesterday. I think unfortuneately the FDA and USDA have allowed specialist buyers to rest on their laurels: In a case of good money leaving when bad shows up, when the Feds create regulatory bodies, in many cases, private regulations that specify a higher merit, standard, or quality tend to disappear and all providers manage-down to the level of government certification. [Cars and IIHS are an interesting counter-example, fwiw.] The long and short of it is this: when there are e-coli. problems that "get past" FDA/UDSA regulated entities and show up on grocers shelves, one wonders if there is any private entity between the seller of the damaged goods and the ultimate buyer who can or should act as a quality control agent.
It would probably be useful for me to pull a Francisco D'Aconia maneuver and work as a produce stocker in a grocery store for a while. Alas, I wasn't born pre-destined to wealth and cannot afford the vacation from reality and my current income:)
The second aspect of the discussion revolves around who should specialize in the investigation and prosecution of fraud. Fraud is a crime. Apart from the most strident anarchists, most people concede that the prosecution of crimes and the punishment of criminals is the sole domain of a uniform body of specialists who have a _monopoly_ on that activity, i.e., a government. The notion of competing governments or competing ideas of due process are interesting but not sufficiently explored, IMO.
I agree that specialization in fraud investigation is a good thing.
However, why do you conclude that this must be undertaken by government actors? You posit that NGO fraud detectors exist and are a good thing, but conclude that free-riders make government answers preferable.
When comparing government vs. non-government actors, the government connotation means just a few things: - the government acts coercively - the government tends to forbid competiting actors in that space - the government has few or dubious performance metrics and oversight processes
Private regulatory agencies are quite successful, except as they are replaced by government actors. UL, Good Housekeeping, Consumer Reports, etc are all Non-government ratings agencies that have provided tremendous value to folks over their histories.
A great personal example of this is IIHS.org. The government has been doing crash testing for a long time, but I never even bother looking at it, because IIHS does _Better_ testing and publishes the raw data of those tests, including photographs.
It's exactly what you'd expect market actors to do: figure out how to do something that helps their bottom line. For every car company with an incentive to skimp on engineering to make more profit on a car, there is someone at the IIHS with an incentive to see that nobody is buying cars that hurt people.
If you spend time trawling through the IIHS data, the survivability of new cars is amazing vs. designs of just 5 years ago. As you move out to the 10 year timeframe its startling how much better new cars are in terms of safety cage deformation and dummy kinetic loads. There is no law that requires BMW to build a stiffer, more survivable car than Dodge. But BMW does, and BMW's customers pay more for a better product.
Unlike a law saying "cars must be built like this", and the simplistic "stars" rating of the government tests, consumers can look at the IIHS technical data and see just HOW MUCH MORE of their left shoulder is going to get crushed in a side-impact hit in a 5 series vs. a Neon. They can then make a cost vs. risk decision that fits their situation appropriately.
I never put much stock in car-saftey talk until I looked at the photos and the numbers. The "centimeters past drivers centerline" number in side impacts is most illuminating.
Actually, if you look at the bills he introduces, you could most accurately say that he beleives:
If you want to conduct your affairs in something other than Federal Reserve Notes, you shouldn't be raided by the Secret Service and have all of your assets confiscated.
[i.e. "allow competing currencies"].
He advocates free-market money; let people decide what they want to use as a medium of exchange and a store of value. And history shows that gold or other precious metals are the most common market-derived solution to this problem, but they certainly aren't the only solution.
There are a few reasons for this point of view. One is the "pure freedom" angle: the government ought not to force you to agree with it on what money is. Secondly, and more practically: inflation of the money supply has certain ramifications. The ramifications tend to be disadvantageous to savers and extremely advantageous to the investing and financier/banking classes of society.
People not close to the new money created by inflation tend to lose out. The US monetary system is kind of a prisoners dilemma problem: if you don't play [borrow and invest], you lose, because your dollars are going to become worth less and less over time, and the new wealth will accrue in the new dollars that those who _did_ "play" received.
In the absense of Legal Tender laws, people who don't want to play on the debt-financed FRN treadmill can simply opt out, and say "i refuse to do business with FRNs, and i refuse to use FRNs to denominate my wealth"
Milton Friedman, who is much less ideologically pure than RP and other Austrian economists, comes to the same practical conclusion regarding inflation: it should be limited. While Friedman beleives that state-controlled fiat money is fine, it must be judiciously guarded from inflation to be fair, ethical, successful, and so on. Naturally we haven't done that in the US... really at any point in our history of non-specie backed currency.
The only people left who think inflating-away debt and stimulus^Wdeficit spending are worthwhile endeavours are die-hard Keynesians who will say anything if it leads to retained state power, and will do anything so long as it allows them (the politically connected class) to broker favors for their moneyed benefactors.
The collusion between banking and government embodied by the FRS is really unsettling. History shows that no government, given sole control of peoples money, can long resist the urge to bend it to the political fashion of the day.
I don't think Ron Paul is putting forward unreasonable bills. He wants to open the books on the Fed. The harder you look, the more you see the... strangeness in their affairs. He wants to allow people to NOT use FRNs without fear of federal reprisal. What's the harm in that?
No amount of time or money or advocacy will fix the system in a timeframe useful to my own children, so the only reasonable solution for me is to opt-out. I plan on homeschooling.
So long as the government has its tendrils in schooling, schooling will continue to work contrary to the goal of educating.
If I retain the freedoms of homeschooling and firearms ownership, you people can ruin society for yourselves. We'll, to borrow a popularism, route around the defects.
for larger businesses hardware is so cheap that it doesn't make sense. We're about to buy a few $15,000 servers when the new Intel CPU's come out. 2 6 core CPU's, 72GB of RAM, 500GB to 1TB of hard drive space, all kinds of monitoring capability, etc for $15,000 each
Still, no matter how many computers you buy and how expensive you make them, paying humans to keep them running is going to be the largest portion of IT costs.
The question is: do you want your organization to become a lean-n-mean specialist in keeping IT infrastructure running, or would you like to buy "IT service" from someone who _does_ specialize in that industry? If you have 100 servers to keep running with 5 guys, and you don't really need more than 100 servers.. how do you make your IT business more efficient? Are you really going to push to "lose" one of your employees?
My company is a strategic competitor to google, so while "company loyalty" might dictate that I badmouth them, the scale, uptime, and efficiency of Google's IT operations speaks for itself. They have innovated IT since day 0, from building their own server hardware, to re-thinking reliabilty, to engineering their own power and cooling -- they have innovated up and down the entire vertical stack of IT infrastructure.
"WeSellWidgets" and their IT staff of "2 dudes, mostly" is simply _never_ going to compete with that. So when google or amazon or Microsoft [home team plug] or whomever says "we can give you this for this monthly dollar amount" and you honestly assess your costs of insourcing.. for a number of situations the cloud-hosted model makes sense.
At MS we try not to hire people as full time employees for tasks that don't relate to the core mission of our business. The same lady has been the cashier in my cafeteria for years, but she doesn't work for MS - she works for an agency that MS has contracted with. Selling Food to employees isn't something Microsoft wants to make part of its core business, and so we outsource that entire problem to a company who _does_ want to do that.
IT infrastructure is not the primary mission of most companies that need to consume IT. Plumbing isn't the core mission of most companies that need to consume water, and electricity isn't the core mission of most companies that need to consume electricity. In the latter two cases, maintenance of plumbing and electrical systems is almost universally outsourced. People continue to disagree on when and how IT services will tend to be thought of as plumbing and electrical "always on, take them for granted" type services, but most people seem to agree that it is an eventual inevitability.
You should read the book mentioned. I'm only assuming you haven't because there's a lot of stuff to get out in the open if you've read it and have a number of fundamental disagreements with the base material.
Now then, I didn't say what you've claimed I did about socialism; I did not say that in a socialist system no individual has any amount of autonomy, I said simply that in socialist socities, others [the state] make decisions for you. The difference is simply between freedom and coercion. Note that you do not disagree on this distinction between capitalism and socialism, infact you reconfirm it.
I'm glad that you seem to agree that communism is fundamentally evil. What is strange is that you attempt to put distance between socialism, which you think is "Great", and communism, which you think is awful, only by saying that the difference is in degree, not ideology. You've essentially agreed with me that socialism and communism are the same, interms of being based on the suppression of the individual to further the aims of some group, but as a practical matter, they are different because while both have the same underlying assumption, they differ on how far they explore the ramifications of that assumption, and to whom they designate as the recipients of the sacrifices of the many.
A few specific nitpicks
and having any sort of government whatsoever is Socialism.
I don't think this is accurate. Socialism posits that the society is superior to the individual. But a constitutionally limited republic, such as the US, is defined protect the intrinsic rights of the individual. The society has no rights to protect -- nor would they need protecting. After all, absent some government, the mob always gets its way. The government of the united states exists, theoretically, for the singular purpose of protecting the individual against his neighbor(s). And this task is delegated to government so that it may be done uniformly and predictably.
The intelligent society would be one where the two forces are used to best serve the people.
Nothing serves "the people". Each "thing" a government does benefits some and ignores or harms others. Besides, "the people", collectively, have no rights. They are a non-entity. Only individuals exist in a meaningful way.
Your simplistic view is a result of not being able to hold two diametrically opposed views at the same time. Everything is either all out black, or all out white, and grey is a failure.
Ironically, Rand (and Orwell) go on at some length about how the looting class must condition themselves to beleive in two diametrically opposed things and bury the cognitive disonnance required to still function as a human. In 1984 this was called "doublethink". I figured both books were probably accurate assessments, but I never expected anyone to come right out and admit it about themselves so honestly.
Naturally, I don't think of what you describe as especially virtuous.
You rail against public schools, but I can promise you one thing. In a purely Capitalistic society, education would be much worse unless you were rich. It's only by Socialism that everyone in America has access to school, and is able to, if they can, learn.
The literacy rate in the US was 98% before compulsory schooling arrived. Read "Education, Free and Compulsory" by Murray Rothbard to understand the motivations and effect of compulsory schooling.
My assessment of how hard you've thought about these things comes not from the fact that you disagree with me, but because you gloss over and do not implicitly [or explicitly] refute so much outstanding thinking and writing contrary to what you've written. There are many people who espouse your eminently compatabile and pragmatic seeming view. But if they honestly assess their axioms and epistemological foundations, they find them wanting, or all
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the argument that an arbitrarily advanced society doesn't need "resources" is silly.
All work requires energy. Any advanced alien race is constantly expending energy.
_The_ source of energy in the universe is star fusion. Convertible energy is radiated out from stars at a rate proportional to the size and lifecycle phase of the star, and the collector efficiency & distance from that star.
IOW, the amount of work an advanced society could do, under normal circumstances, would be limited by how much star energy they could capture and utilize, and that in turn, would be limited by the power output of nearby stars, and how close they stayed to any given star.
So you have a fairly limiting energy problem, that is frankly an artificial constraint.
Here's why: all _energy_ comes from star radiation, all non-star _matter_ is a form of energy storage. By exploiting resources, be they asteroids or planets or anything else.. in "matter" form.. a civlization can consume energy at a higher rate than the local star output.. and at a further distance away from a near-by producing star.
IOW, the consumption of non-radiated-energyresources enables _faster_ travel or _further_ travel. While there may be some _very_ old space-faring society that has realized the "peak entropy" problem and now voluntarily limits itself to consuming energy at the average star-dissapation rate... younger space faring races would not necessarily conform to this self-imposition, and would consume matter -- nature's energy storage batteries -- to fuel their ambitions.
Assuming you beleive in this dichotemy: the advanced society which artificially limits its energy consumption (and therefore growth), and the transitional society which does not, which is more likely to make an exploratory trip towards Earth? I contend that a society which has written off further expansion does not actively seek to do more exploration.
So, if we meet somebody, oods are, they consume matter to acheive their goals. We cannot predict which forms of matter are most amenable to their technology and needs, but we can probably assume that they aren't going to park in Solar orbit and just "hang out" until they've soaked up enough rays in "Trickle charge" mode to continue about their business. Not when there is all this matter diversity nearby that they could exploit.
I'm not saying that they'll see earth, and say, "Yes!! Finally!! Brocoli!" But they may very well say "look! oxygen [the universal propellant oxidizer for chemical propulsion] exists in all 3 forms of matter on the blue planet."
Or maybe space faring societies, upon seeing a small rocky planet with a gooey core made of molten ferrous liquid... get the same ideas we do when we see a crust deposit of black long-chain hydrocarbon liquid..
It is only expensive because of the NIMBY crowd and the ear of government that they have.
The government has completely raped the nuclear power industry. There's no free market involved. What is there for the market to sort out?
PS: CO2 emissions are irrelevant. Bringing up Co2 makes you lose credibility. All people concerned about Co2 should stop exhaling. That would solve many of the worlds problems simultaneously.
The reasons to do fission power are numerous; fewer _actual_ pollutants is just one of them.
I've walked through a nuke plant that got stopped during construction because of stupid people. It's depressing. It's like living inside of "Atlas Shrugged", where you see that the stupidest, least worthwhile elements of society are destroying everything worth glorifying about America... engineering, science, progress, entrepreneurship, etc.
In summary, I would be willing to take a huge pay cut if my job was to spend 40 hrs/week driving a road grater over the sub-humans who cock-block nuclear power in this country.
Likewise. I read a Dave Ramsey book.
I've largely abandoned the use of credit cards, although I retain them for fast access to flexible spending power.
But I view the return to a cash-in-hand lifestyle as a half-way point to what I suspect is coming; a goods/barter/specie-currency based economy.
The US Dollar will crash, probably within the next 5 years. When that happens, I won't be fully self sufficient, and I'll want to trade with other people, and I'll need something I can use to do that. The most likely form of post-collapse money will be 22LR ammunition.
We went to Europe a few years ago without having a sufficient amount of cash with us. There were a lot of things we were locked out of doing until we were able to get credit-card cash advances in local currency. I was surprised at how non-credit oriented many places in Germany were.
It's a harrowing feeling: "your money isn't good here".
I suspect that most Americans will get to experience that in their own grocery store before too much longer.
Of course. But a random bit of metal is much harder to create out of thin air, and thus it is much better insulated against the problem of currency inflation.
Currency inflation is the problem. It is what makes the USD and indeed the US economy a bit of a prisoners dilemma. If you attempt to store your wealth in US dollars, you will find that over time, the value of that wealth approaches zero. This is due entirely to the inflation of the monetary base. This inflation is something which you do not control, and which legally you cannot opt-out of.
So the US economy requires that everyone who wants to merely keep their head "above water" finds places to put their USD denominated wealth such that it pays interest at at least the natural rate of inflation. But of course, putting your money into a fractional reserve bank may pay interest, but it also inflates the money supply. So you don't really win there.
Refusing to "play the game" means you lose, and "playing the game" from a weakened position [i.e. without the collusion of th government in maintaining a monopoly, or avoiding fraud prosecution, etc] means that you will also usually lose.
So due to the tremendous ease with which new dollars are created, and the legal tender laws which make it illegal for you to REFUSE to participate in this game, you and most people will continue to lose, as they are continually worked literally _to death_ to just keep their head above water, wealth-wise.
Of course, rows in some database are even easier to inflate than paper bills. And infact, much of the actual growth of the supply of dollars is just that: "electronic" dollars.
Having a specie based money and a strong discouragement towards paper instruments lets you avoid the insiduous destruction of inflation. And private actors _could_ do that now, but they'd be outside of the protections of government and society. Indeed, if they did it "too much", they'd become the prey of government agencies who don't fancy having their power and authority challenged.
There's nothing special about Gold. It's just that, for a number of very practical reasons, precious metals are a very good choice for a curency. Assaying precious metals is more uniform, than say, assaying cows. And cutting and recombining different fractions of whole cows is much messier, and considerably damages the value of your cow. Inert metals can be melted and cut and recombined and reminted essentially indefinitely.
When it becomes possible to cheaply inflate the supply of Gold, gold will become a very poor store of wealth and medium of exchange. But until then, when individuals are allowed to freely choose what they'd like to use as a store of wealth and a medium of exchange, Gold and Silver invariably are what they choose. THe reasons have little to do with any widely-held value assessment of gold, and instead have much to do with the practical utility of precious metals, for the reasons I discuss above.
I wish someone would make "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" into a film [without wrecking its message], and release it in US theaters on July 4.
And then I wish that the people who watched it would actually think about what they had seen. And it would be even nicer if the extent of their reaction went past "just thinking about it".
I wonder if the next generation of Apple Personal Computers can deliver what their customers want today -- namely, the sense of smug superiority and being set apart for having the priviledge of overpaying for a name and some self-righteous packaging that advertises where something was _Designed_ [in california, no less], as if that had any bearing on its fitness for any objective purpose...
Yes.. I wonder if in the near future, Jobs and Apple will be able to deliver that without actually putting any electronics in the machine at all...
Will it still be a personal computer, since it does what its buyers want?
I see a business opportunity, btw. Selling Apple laptop "skins" that either
- cover up some other brand of computer
- don't contain a computer at all. The skin is just that - you just sit somewhere in public, with a laptop-looking-thing open, proudly showing the apple logo to all who pretend to not be looking at your glorious presence.
With a fake-Apple skin over your laptop, Onlookers will see that you are better than they are, and will forgive you for spending 2 hours fucking with your hair all to make it look like you didn't spend any time on it. They'll want to sit down and ask you what important work you're doing, but be too threatened because your Apple Skin -- hey, the name of the product will be called "Apple Peel" -- your Apple Peel clad-device will put an impenetrable psychological distance between you, the annointed, and them, the plebians. And so they will remain standoffish and contemptuous, and at least in this little microcosm of the stifled social dynamics of the wifi coffee-shop, you will emerge victorious.
Apple Peel (C) -- the apple-branded covering for your affordable and functional laptop. All of the social superiority, none of the overpriced shittyness of an actual apple product.
You saw it here first. I want royalties.
The counter point is this: __you folks__ need to wake up and understand that _governments_ do not and never will have your best interest in mind.
The story blurb is of course ridiculous but i think you are downplaying the extent to which software/system vulnerabilities will be a factor in future conflicts. Especially due to the assymetrical, break once, break everywhere dynamics of attacking widely deployed IT.
I'm not sure who the US will use this against, but I suspect many people will be able to use IT attacks against the US. And it's going to be terribly effective, because getting new IT created, tested, deployed, and humans trained on how to run it, takes us a lot of time and money. But once some guy figures out how to break it... usually it's broken everywhere at once.
IOW: attacking the US's use of IT is going to be a force multiplier for people that don't like us. And they'll probably be able to do it on the cheap. Whatever they cannot figure out themselves, they can pay someone $5-$50k in Russia to figure out how to do for them.
I've heard that for a long time, ground-to-sat control signals weren't authenticated or encrypted. For a long time, screwing with Uncle Sam was kind of a "security through obscurity" sort of affair, but the clock has pretty much run down on that concept; seeing what kind of successful attacks are waged will be interesting.
Suppose for the sake of argument that some GPS-guidance system were using an off the shelf receiver that had support for the D-GPS standard [the stuff where a terrestrial signal is used to enhance accuracy]. Even though the military can use the "military grade" GPS, more and more work is getting accompolished using consumer receivers, so its only natural to assume that some may have this "local radio" feature that i seem to remember.
So what's to stop someone who has a factory he doesn't want getting blown up to introduce a huge "correction" offset into the local signal. Perhaps you can misdirect people and potentially munitions [not aware of any GPS guided munitions though].
Or suppose that our ground units aren't using encrypted comms all the time? suppose you've got a radio listener that records everything it hears, and correlates that with times, channels, etc. Some association rule mining and you have gleaned a working model of who is using the radio when, and what they are saying. Now you decide to start playing back the audio you previously recorded, and for some amount of time, everyone using radios is _really_ confused. Maybe you even call in a false operation or movement. Maybe you convince the US to bomb an orphanage by giving a _very_ authentic sounding (you just replay Private Pyle's voice, after all) request for ordinance at coordinates you control.
The weak link in all of these computer-aided decision systems is that humans beleive them when they shouldn't, and that humans don't do enough to protect them from tampering. rather than some kind of magic wave [which could very well work, for instance by somehow distrurbing the small gyroscopes that inertial nav systems use... but again, that would be ANTI aircraft instead of launched from aircraft], figuring out how to mis-use the technology to cause problems for the humans will be where successfull attacks come from.
If I were going to try and wreck the superior tech advantages of the US military, I'd start by understanding the sensor inputs to the machines that do the thinking. Are laser guided munitions effective in heavy fog or other light-attenuation situations? Can i build goggles that let me see where directed laser energy is currently lighting things up? If so, i can predict targets. If i have boots on the ground near the target, i can find out exactly where the illuminator is positioned (by placing a sheet 10m infront of hte target and working it through a range of motion to see when i am/am not illuminated). If i use several of my own laser designators, can I re-direct a laser-seeking munitions head?
The professionals have been playing war games a lot longer that I've been writing slashdot posts. But I know from an entire lifetime of working with software that there will always be bugs, and humans will beleive the machine when they shouldn't.
So I work for Microsoft.. most hated software company, right?
Not always, apparently. Thanks to competition like Adobe, we're going to have to up our game.
Without going into too many details, a friend of mine was a Microsoft developer that was in a position where he was trading email with an extenal ISV as part of a formal MS program. So there was this stream of question and answer emails between them about how to use what we were working on to address this ISV's particular business problems. Anyway, at the end of one of this ISV's emails back to us, he says
"PS: Can you guys somehow crush Adobe Corporation? I honesly and truly hate them."
So there you go. That day, we lost. Adobe was the more hated company. We resolved to work harder to be #1 again.
Than when?
Cars of today nearly universally have faster acceleration than cars of any previous decade. Power, torque, weight, gearing, and aerodynamics, as well as low internal resistance all contribute in various ways, depending on which specific cars you are comparing. But the trend is unmistakable: todays cars are much faster. Anecdote: My Minivan has more horsepower than my 1st generation BMW M5.
This is also false. The tires of today are absolutely amazing compared to rubber of just a few years ago. The suspensions of todays cars are considerably more advanced -- meaning they maintain effective tire adhesion in more sorts of circumstances. Todays cars control air flow much better than older cars -- it is uncommon for cars to have significant lift at highway speeds today, which was a serious safety hazard on older designs.
The brake system performance of the last 20 years are amazing compared to the pre-1980s stuff. The change away from asbestos drum linings to modern pad compounds and 4-wheel discs, and the introduction of ABS has really done wonders for stopping distances, fade resistance, and controllability in panic maneuvers.
Today I was driving on an empty stretch of curvy road in my prepared track car, a 1987 BMW 325. I was driving on bad street tires, but none the less, I checked my speeds at apex and before the final braking zone. My 2007 Audi station wagon shows a higher apex speed and a higher terminal speed through the same stretch of road, and it is still running my snow tires. It is about 800 lbs heavier and only has 30 more horse power, and unlike my much lighter BMW, the A4 gets 30mpg reliably on highways. That's fantastic performance out of a daily-driven family car.
The cars of today are truly amazing compared to those of even 20 years ago. I love older cars just as much as the next car guy, but they are uncompetitive, even against their newer, much heavier brethren. True, the margin of performance difference between new and old cars is often eclipsed by the breadth of driver-talent difference amongst the respective drivers, and so occasionally old cars win races against newer ones.
Also, the passive safety of todays vehicles is absolutely amazing: look at the technical data on iihs.org for details.
Drivers also have better opportunities to become better, safer drivers than ever before. The assertion that drivers aren't getting any better may or may not be true in the common case [i wasn't rating drivers 40 years ago], but the training available to drivers today who want to take it is fantastic.
I've personally taught teens, as part of the "Street Survival Program", car control and panic-avoidance techniques that you had to go to a racing instruction school to learn as recently as 10 years ago [which is where I learned them].
For those who wish to excel, now is a better time than ever to become a car pilot.
This is what people often say, as a criticism of homeschooling.
I have carefully arranged my life so that I don't ever deal with anyone I don't like dealing with. I work at a company with a very high hiring bar such that I _never_ deal with people who are stupid _and_ assholes.
Real life is nothing like school. In the real world, when I don't like someone, I don't invite them to my house. If they insist that they can bother me even after I've retreated to my home, I get to shoot them -- a decidedly righteous outcome. I don't have to let people in my car, I don't have to talk to them, I don't have to answer my phone. Hell, I can shop at private businesses that are members only affairs, and the necessity of interacting with people to even do commerce is all but antiquated at this point.
In my entire existance, I can make what I do, where I do it, and whom may be present while it is done entirely according to my liking. The unifying factor here is money, and the key thing I learned from public schools is that once someone has money, one never has to deal with anything unpleasant.
The only exception to any of this is the government. Only they have the power to coerce me; the government is the only entity where I _MUST_ deal with them on their terms instead of on my own.
Given what I had to put up with in public schools, it is no surprise that I am a libertarian/minarchist, and that my children will be homeschooled. What I cannot understand is that anyone could honestly come to any _other_ conclusion. I mean, I think you are arguing that getting the shit beat out of you and being forbidden from defending yourself is "good" for people; something all kids should experience.
Well, instead of learning that much of life is about being the punching bag for the socially favored classes, my children will learn marksmanship.
That's honestly amazing. If you were a woman today with a fertility problem such that you needed an egg retreival done from your own body, for your own use, and were paying 100% out of pocket.. it would cost you under $8k for the entire procedure and medicines. Additional stuff [like doing an IVF fertilization and re-inserting an embryo] would cost more, of course.
So the high price offered for donor eggs must be attributed to the following:
- the tremendous invasiveness of the procedure, to be borne by someone with no non-financial stake in the process
- the desirability and scarcity of your "high quality" donor eggs.
- any part of the contract that has a performance guarantee, i.e. they will keep doing egg retreivals on you until "they" are satisfied, and all of this is covered under the original agreed price
The funny thing about the donor egg market is that people ought to be looking at _your_ mom as an additional fitness indicator: IIRC, all of your immature egg cells were present when you were in-utero.
I wonder if anyone pays 100k for "Ivy League daughter of an Ivy League Daughter" :)
What part of the procedure made you uninterested? I'm familiar with what's involved [see: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1599004&cid=31661810 ] but 35k is an awful lot of seed cash to pass up if you are going to finish school debt free [which I'd hope, given your academic performance].
I am trying to decide if you are being perfectly serious here and exactly on topic, or if this is a witty commentary on "dating" and the commoditization of women -- whereby men know what they are looking for and many talentend and intelligent women focus on leaving college with their Mrs. Degree, as it proves to be more profitable long-term than the diploma the university issues.
Specifically, the woman will typically be placed on an oral contraceptive that suppresses ovulation to "stabilize" her natural menstrual cycle. Then she will come off it at a known point so that her ovulation can be managed with about a 12 hour accuracy.
During this time, she will typically take drug that stimulates ovarian activity -- Follistim is common -- so that she produces multiple mature egg follicles during a single cycle. She'll typically have a few vaginal ultrasounds during the cycle to estabish follicle count and development. Finally, at the pointed time she'll take a dose of medicine that causes the eggs to be finished/matured/released. The following day she goes in for a procedure where a large syringe punctures the vaginal wall and retreives the eggs.
If you remember nothing else from this writeup, these are the key points:
- woman takes a fuckton of ovary-exploding drugs
- doctor puts enomrous syringe THROUGH THE SIDE OF THE VAGINA
From reading the blog post, I was surprised by the # of city staff and # of separate IT departments. From my time in munich [living there for 2 weeks, taking classes at BWS with my wife], I liked the city very much. However my impression is that Munich and surrounding areas that could be considered extensions of the city have a population of only 1M persons. Munich seemed very well developed for this size population, i.e. the u-bahn and s-bahn systems were very extensive and efficient [much better than Berlin, which contends still with re-unification].
Is my assessment of the population of Munich inaccurate? Does Munich have extra functions (perhaps from acting as a seat of government for Bavaria?) that this project is also addressing?
It seems like a large IT infrastructure with many employees and departments. For instance if there are 3000 desktops in use by city workers, on a population of 1m, there is a .3% ratio of humans to government desktops. What percentage of munich's population is a city government employee?
Since we're slinging accusations of misinformation and idiocy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viability_(fetal)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premature_birth#Notable_preterm_births
https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/bitstream/handle/1805/583/OS76-127_VII.pdf?sequence=1
I was playing fast and loose with the age, and I don't see a nice excel chart of "90th percentile fetal viability by gestational week", but I'm at least as close as your notion of how long pregnancy _even lasts_.
The literature is pretty unambiguous about the following: premature babies with low birth weights have considerably higher outcomes when they have access to better NICU and pre-delivery technology. The survivability and zero-defect percentages get higher and higher and the gestational viability age creeps ever younger, as does the mass of viability.
That last link [the PDF] appears to be from the early 70s [based on guess]. It refers to no documented evidence of any infant surviving when born under 600g and before 24 weeks. The wikipedia link, refering to births in the 2003-2005 timeframe, pushes that to 21 weeks and _280g_.
You're trying to argue that medicine hasn't made significant advances in positive outcomes for low weight, early delivery babies since the 1950s.
You are objectively wrong. Don't misinform other slashdotters.
I'm against the healthcare bill, and I am not in the insurance industry, nor am I a right winger. I'm an anti-statist, which nobody seems to know what to do with [well, apart from "safely ignore" :)].
Of course, I don't think much of what the federal government has done since the 1800s has been constitutional, so you can surmise where my most basic objections lie. Ideologically, this isn't the federal government's problem or business. It's actually illegal for them to be doing this. Of course, some people disagree, or some people just don't care what should or shouldn't be legal. Like the congress, for instance, or the previous administration's justice depatment, etc.
But then let's get to your HBR quotes.
- regarding infant mortality rate: the rest of the world measures it differently than we do. If a baby is born prematurely in europe and dies, it isn't counted in infant mortality statistics. Here, it is.
Let me tell you why the US health care system is incredible. I live in a smaller town, and I personally know of 2 babies born in the last 3 years at under 30 weeks gestation, who were delivered and treated in our local hospitals.
Those children are now _normal_. Approximately 25 years ago [and maybe even more recently], no baby born that early had _ever survived_. And now it is happening routinely, in small towns, to the children of "normal" people. Every few years, the youngest surviving baby gets younger. In this country, if my wife went into super-early labor at 25 weeks, they'd not only try to save our baby, but they'd have a good chance, and if they failed, they'd count that in "infant mortality".
On to the issue of overall life expectency: those statistics aren't corrected for murders and other violent deaths. The real news should have been "In the US, there are a lot of poor people and ethnic underclasses who like to kill each other and find other ways to die early.". They also aren't corrected for the obesity problem and the # of working hours and the per capita and aggregate productivity of the US. The average US worker works more hours and produces more wealth than in any other ecnomy. If you want to argue that we are working ourselves to death, that's fine, but I don't think of that as a problem with the quality of our care.
_Nobody_ leaves the US to get healthcare of a higher _quality_ elsewhere. _Some_ people leave the US to try and get care of a lower _cost_. But when money is no object, as it often is for foreign politicians, they seem to frequently leave their utopian state care systems behind and come here to get treated. That's the damning evidence that continues to argue that if you want the best, and you can pay, the US is the only place to get it and get it as soon as you want it.
Never, ever tell me what is in my best interest. I'll decide for myself. With gunfire, if you insist.
Actually, the second amendment is the _most_ important because its the teeth in all of the rest of them. It is an _individual_ right, one which the ACLU _does not support_. I am not an ACLU hater, but I do wish they were a bit more... rationally grounded in their assessment of what our inalienable rights are. The constitution said it was one list. The ACLU uses a different list with some overlap.
Now, on to the issue of laws against animal cruelty: those are not only unimportant, they should be repealed.
See, animals don't have intrinsic rights, and even if they do, our constitution doesn't say so, and doesn't say that it was formed to protect those rights.
The entire breadth and scope of our government's rationale is the proection if the intrinsic rights of individuals, even against the desire of their neighbors to harm them via the power of majority.
Animals don't figure into this at all. Any law concerning animals needs to focus on property rights and food / safety issues. As long as it's your animal and your back yard and you're not spreading a pathogen into the local ecosystem, you should be able to electrocute your dogs balls or whatever other disgusting thing you want to do. Any laws to the contrary are ungrounded in objective reality. Our animal cruelty laws are nothing more than the result of most americans liking some animals more than others. Want to torture a worm? Nobody is going to stop you, but nobody can explain why the current laws SHOULD protect dogs but SHOULDN'T protect some of the other animals that currently aren't protected.
I love being the guy on slashdot that argues that torturing your own pets should be legal. It's not because i dislike animals, it's because all laws need to derive from self-consistent axioms, and nobody has articulated what those are as relates to protecting animals.
I know, asking for consistency in law and principles is pissing in the wind :)
Everytime _I_ buy something that says made in China, I think that the $1 that 13 year old girl got for making the logic board was $1 she didn't get by being a child prostitute. Or I think, that $1 will be better than the $0 she would have gotten doing subsistance farming and flood management, like her ancestors have done nearly unchanged for the last 6000 years.
The best way to lift the Chinese out of the mess they are in is the injection of outside capital, and the US has been playing a large role in that.
But that capital has to make its way into the hands of normal people. Government-to-government aid never does this, it's why our aid to Africa continues to prop up horrible governments and makes hte people worse, rather than better.
To the extent that us buying chinese made goods pays wages to the common man in China, that's a positive infusion of cash into that economy.
The rub, as you rightly point out, is the degree to which the government suppresses the inevitable desire for the newely emerging affluent and middle classes of Chinese to demand better conditions. When they come to see the government as an impediment between them and what is next, and have a history of work and accomplishment [and change] behind them, they will increasingly force the issue of improving their lot, both individually and collectively. And the government will have to continue to loosen its grip and respond if it wants to remain legitimate.
But the money has to be there first.
The US consumer is paying the way for China to become a free people and an economic super power.
Thanks for the well written response.
The Vitamins example is interesting for two reasons. One, I'm a proponent of eliminating the FDA. The FDA sends a number of Americans to their graves every year by preventing people from experimenting with untested protocols that they and their doctors might be willing to try, having exhausted other options. Milton Friedman gives the FDA case special attention in "Free to Choose", and I think it's a good point that I certainly don't do justice to here.
For the benefit of people who might be reading this, let's be sure we're not mixing two issues. There is the issue of the fly-by-night drug maker developing a bad product, and then there is the issue of claiming something false.
Most people would assert that the FDA has taken over the role as gatekeeper of product quality, and under their care, lead-as-vitamins would not come to market. But this isn't the case. The procedures for avoiding FDA scrutiny are straightforward: simply claim that your product is not allowed to specify a health or medicinal purpose, and the FDA stays away. So we've got lead-vitamins on the shelves.
We have an information problem and a specialization problem as you point out: Joe can't be expected to do a careful study of every vitamin available to him. Who can? In the past, it was Joe's grocer who did this. Once upon a time, the retailer was an expert in the products he chose to stock, and he provided a very valuable service: keeping bad products off his shelves and away from his customers. Alas, the lack of owner/operator grocery stores [and owner/operator stores in general] has led to a decline in quality dynamic of retail transactions.
Today, there is still a buying manager that decides how to stock grocery shelves, but she is far away from the store where the product is puchased. I don't have any insight into how effective of a force for consumer good the modern, distant, _more_ specialized buyer is vs. the grocer of yesterday. I think unfortuneately the FDA and USDA have allowed specialist buyers to rest on their laurels: In a case of good money leaving when bad shows up, when the Feds create regulatory bodies, in many cases, private regulations that specify a higher merit, standard, or quality tend to disappear and all providers manage-down to the level of government certification. [Cars and IIHS are an interesting counter-example, fwiw.] The long and short of it is this: when there are e-coli. problems that "get past" FDA/UDSA regulated entities and show up on grocers shelves, one wonders if there is any private entity between the seller of the damaged goods and the ultimate buyer who can or should act as a quality control agent.
It would probably be useful for me to pull a Francisco D'Aconia maneuver and work as a produce stocker in a grocery store for a while. Alas, I wasn't born pre-destined to wealth and cannot afford the vacation from reality and my current income :)
The second aspect of the discussion revolves around who should specialize in the investigation and prosecution of fraud. Fraud is a crime. Apart from the most strident anarchists, most people concede that the prosecution of crimes and the punishment of criminals is the sole domain of a uniform body of specialists who have a _monopoly_ on that activity, i.e., a government. The notion of competing governments or competing ideas of due process are interesting but not sufficiently explored, IMO.
I agree that specialization in fraud investigation is a good thing.
However, why do you conclude that this must be undertaken by government actors? You posit that NGO fraud detectors exist and are a good thing, but conclude that free-riders make government answers preferable.
When comparing government vs. non-government actors, the government connotation means just a few things:
- the government acts coercively
- the government tends to forbid competiting actors in that space
- the government has few or dubious performance metrics and oversight processes
Private regulatory agencies are quite successful, except as they are replaced by government actors. UL, Good Housekeeping, Consumer Reports, etc are all Non-government ratings agencies that have provided tremendous value to folks over their histories.
A great personal example of this is IIHS.org. The government has been doing crash testing for a long time, but I never even bother looking at it, because IIHS does _Better_ testing and publishes the raw data of those tests, including photographs.
This page: http://www.iihs.org/about.html explains how and why IIHS is funded.
It's exactly what you'd expect market actors to do: figure out how to do something that helps their bottom line. For every car company with an incentive to skimp on engineering to make more profit on a car, there is someone at the IIHS with an incentive to see that nobody is buying cars that hurt people.
If you spend time trawling through the IIHS data, the survivability of new cars is amazing vs. designs of just 5 years ago. As you move out to the 10 year timeframe its startling how much better new cars are in terms of safety cage deformation and dummy kinetic loads. There is no law that requires BMW to build a stiffer, more survivable car than Dodge. But BMW does, and BMW's customers pay more for a better product.
Unlike a law saying "cars must be built like this", and the simplistic "stars" rating of the government tests, consumers can look at the IIHS technical data and see just HOW MUCH MORE of their left shoulder is going to get crushed in a side-impact hit in a 5 series vs. a Neon. They can then make a cost vs. risk decision that fits their situation appropriately.
I never put much stock in car-saftey talk until I looked at the photos and the numbers. The "centimeters past drivers centerline" number in side impacts is most illuminating.
Actually, if you look at the bills he introduces, you could most accurately say that he beleives:
If you want to conduct your affairs in something other than Federal Reserve Notes, you shouldn't be raided by the Secret Service and have all of your assets confiscated.
[i.e. "allow competing currencies"].
He advocates free-market money; let people decide what they want to use as a medium of exchange and a store of value. And history shows that gold or other precious metals are the most common market-derived solution to this problem, but they certainly aren't the only solution.
There are a few reasons for this point of view. One is the "pure freedom" angle: the government ought not to force you to agree with it on what money is. Secondly, and more practically: inflation of the money supply has certain ramifications. The ramifications tend to be disadvantageous to savers and extremely advantageous to the investing and financier/banking classes of society.
People not close to the new money created by inflation tend to lose out. The US monetary system is kind of a prisoners dilemma problem: if you don't play [borrow and invest], you lose, because your dollars are going to become worth less and less over time, and the new wealth will accrue in the new dollars that those who _did_ "play" received.
In the absense of Legal Tender laws, people who don't want to play on the debt-financed FRN treadmill can simply opt out, and say "i refuse to do business with FRNs, and i refuse to use FRNs to denominate my wealth"
Milton Friedman, who is much less ideologically pure than RP and other Austrian economists, comes to the same practical conclusion regarding inflation: it should be limited. While Friedman beleives that state-controlled fiat money is fine, it must be judiciously guarded from inflation to be fair, ethical, successful, and so on. Naturally we haven't done that in the US... really at any point in our history of non-specie backed currency.
The only people left who think inflating-away debt and stimulus^Wdeficit spending are worthwhile endeavours are die-hard Keynesians who will say anything if it leads to retained state power, and will do anything so long as it allows them (the politically connected class) to broker favors for their moneyed benefactors.
The collusion between banking and government embodied by the FRS is really unsettling. History shows that no government, given sole control of peoples money, can long resist the urge to bend it to the political fashion of the day.
I don't think Ron Paul is putting forward unreasonable bills. He wants to open the books on the Fed. The harder you look, the more you see the ... strangeness in their affairs. He wants to allow people to NOT use FRNs without fear of federal reprisal. What's the harm in that?
No amount of time or money or advocacy will fix the system in a timeframe useful to my own children, so the only reasonable solution for me is to opt-out. I plan on homeschooling.
So long as the government has its tendrils in schooling, schooling will continue to work contrary to the goal of educating.
If I retain the freedoms of homeschooling and firearms ownership, you people can ruin society for yourselves. We'll, to borrow a popularism, route around the defects.
Still, no matter how many computers you buy and how expensive you make them, paying humans to keep them running is going to be the largest portion of IT costs.
The question is: do you want your organization to become a lean-n-mean specialist in keeping IT infrastructure running, or would you like to buy "IT service" from someone who _does_ specialize in that industry? If you have 100 servers to keep running with 5 guys, and you don't really need more than 100 servers.. how do you make your IT business more efficient? Are you really going to push to "lose" one of your employees?
My company is a strategic competitor to google, so while "company loyalty" might dictate that I badmouth them, the scale, uptime, and efficiency of Google's IT operations speaks for itself. They have innovated IT since day 0, from building their own server hardware, to re-thinking reliabilty, to engineering their own power and cooling -- they have innovated up and down the entire vertical stack of IT infrastructure.
"WeSellWidgets" and their IT staff of "2 dudes, mostly" is simply _never_ going to compete with that. So when google or amazon or Microsoft [home team plug] or whomever says "we can give you this for this monthly dollar amount" and you honestly assess your costs of insourcing.. for a number of situations the cloud-hosted model makes sense.
At MS we try not to hire people as full time employees for tasks that don't relate to the core mission of our business. The same lady has been the cashier in my cafeteria for years, but she doesn't work for MS - she works for an agency that MS has contracted with. Selling Food to employees isn't something Microsoft wants to make part of its core business, and so we outsource that entire problem to a company who _does_ want to do that.
IT infrastructure is not the primary mission of most companies that need to consume IT. Plumbing isn't the core mission of most companies that need to consume water, and electricity isn't the core mission of most companies that need to consume electricity. In the latter two cases, maintenance of plumbing and electrical systems is almost universally outsourced. People continue to disagree on when and how IT services will tend to be thought of as plumbing and electrical "always on, take them for granted" type services, but most people seem to agree that it is an eventual inevitability.
You should read the book mentioned. I'm only assuming you haven't because there's a lot of stuff to get out in the open if you've read it and have a number of fundamental disagreements with the base material.
Now then, I didn't say what you've claimed I did about socialism; I did not say that in a socialist system no individual has any amount of autonomy, I said simply that in socialist socities, others [the state] make decisions for you. The difference is simply between freedom and coercion. Note that you do not disagree on this distinction between capitalism and socialism, infact you reconfirm it.
I'm glad that you seem to agree that communism is fundamentally evil. What is strange is that you attempt to put distance between socialism, which you think is "Great", and communism, which you think is awful, only by saying that the difference is in degree, not ideology. You've essentially agreed with me that socialism and communism are the same, interms of being based on the suppression of the individual to further the aims of some group, but as a practical matter, they are different because while both have the same underlying assumption, they differ on how far they explore the ramifications of that assumption, and to whom they designate as the recipients of the sacrifices of the many.
A few specific nitpicks
I don't think this is accurate. Socialism posits that the society is superior to the individual. But a constitutionally limited republic, such as the US, is defined protect the intrinsic rights of the individual. The society has no rights to protect -- nor would they need protecting. After all, absent some government, the mob always gets its way. The government of the united states exists, theoretically, for the singular purpose of protecting the individual against his neighbor(s). And this task is delegated to government so that it may be done uniformly and predictably.
Nothing serves "the people". Each "thing" a government does benefits some and ignores or harms others. Besides, "the people", collectively, have no rights. They are a non-entity. Only individuals exist in a meaningful way.
Ironically, Rand (and Orwell) go on at some length about how the looting class must condition themselves to beleive in two diametrically opposed things and bury the cognitive disonnance required to still function as a human. In 1984 this was called "doublethink". I figured both books were probably accurate assessments, but I never expected anyone to come right out and admit it about themselves so honestly.
Naturally, I don't think of what you describe as especially virtuous.
The literacy rate in the US was 98% before compulsory schooling arrived. Read "Education, Free and Compulsory" by Murray Rothbard to understand the motivations and effect of compulsory schooling.
My assessment of how hard you've thought about these things comes not from the fact that you disagree with me, but because you gloss over and do not implicitly [or explicitly] refute so much outstanding thinking and writing contrary to what you've written. There are many people who espouse your eminently compatabile and pragmatic seeming view. But if they honestly assess their axioms and epistemological foundations, they find them wanting, or all