Yep - government at all levels is full of stuff like that. Want to know why?
Transparency.
I'm dead serious. When you're dealing with the private sector, the end result is (usually) far more important than the process. Using your above example, the goal is to get you on a plane that takes you to the destination the company wants you to go to - as long as you get there, the only people that care how it gets paid for are the accountants. In government, however, it's much more important that we avoid fraud and waste in the process of purchasing plane tickets than it is that we actually get you on a plane. Government has to make sure that the process is "clean" and "transparent", meaning that you didn't purchase the plane ticket from a vendor because they bribed you, lobbied you, gave you special favors, or otherwise did anything that might give themselves an "unfair advantage" over other airline ticket vendors in the procurement process. Once the government has established that everything is clean and above board through the use of over 200 years of accumulated "rooting out waste" tradition, then and only then can the government actually think about buying an airline ticket for you.
Coincidentally, this is why government-provided goods and services drive a lot of libertarians absolutely nuts. It's not that government can't do the job - of course it can. It does it right now in a variety of areas (police, fire, schools, etc.). However, once you're done dealing with all of the other airline vendors' lobbying (we have to have a "level playing field", whether the vendors are at the same "level" or not), politicians looking to score cheap points by "eliminating waste and fraud", and just general bureaucratic inertia, something that should be fairly simple and straightforward (buy an airline ticket) becomes an inefficient multistage bureaucratic maze that lacks flexibility and costs ten times as much as it would if you or I grabbed our credit cards and bought a plane ticket ourselves.
First, as even your link attests, Republicans haven't used filibusters 3x as much as Democrats did - they're just on pace to, which is very different; keep in mind that many of those cloture votes were used to stall the health care bill. Also, if you take a look at another graph on your reference, you'll notice that cloture votes have been trending up for over a decade as both parties use every rule possible to get their agendas enacted and their opponents' agenda disrupted. It's because of this trend that senators of both parties have brought up the so-called "nuclear option" from time to time.
The insane part about those votes is that filibusters and 3/5 majorities have nothing to do with the Constitution. All the Constitution says is that the Senate has the right to set its own floor rules. The entire reason cloture exists at all is because somebody decided it was a good idea to throw it in over 200 years ago.
Then again, if you want some true madness, there's always the "disappearing quorum" trick.
My first word processor was WordStar as well, only it ran on an Apple//e equipped with a Microsoft CP/M Softcard. That said, I do seem to remember having a batch of stickers that you could apply to your keyboard that sort of mimicked Wordperfect's keyboard templates.
Somewhat similar situation here, only I report to the CEO. Then again, so does just about everyone else, so there you go. I think a lot of it depends on how much the person in charge likes to delegate.
Mmm... I doubt it. Keep in mind that the same people that blew those buildings up are also the same ones that boycotted Denmark over cartoons and assassinated Theo van Gogh. People like them aren't interested in what you do - your existence is offensive enough to their sensibilities.
Having said that, there's a reason people like them have as much support as they have. Part of it is some blowback to American "gunboat diplomacy". Part of it is due to political leaders in the Middle East needing a scapegoat to paper over the fact that, outside of oil revenues, their countries are corrupt kleptocracies with few opportunities for younger, non-politically connected individuals. When you get down to it, there's no simple answer. Would it help if the US backed off? Perhaps, but keep in mind that Israel backed off on the Palestinians after the Oslo accords - how'd that work out for them? What are they doing now?
The simple and sad truth, if there is one in the Middle East, is this: It's not all about the Americans. It's really not. Whether the US was doing anything stupid there or not, it'd still be a mess. It was a mess when the Ottomans ran the place, it was a mess when the British ran the place, it was even a mess when it ran itself during the Caliphate. As long as that's true, the mess will spill over from time to time and make a mess somewhere else.
Many languages have official government-sanctioned boards that determine what's "in" and what's "out", similar to a standardization board (IEEE or something similar). German, for example, has the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung, which helped orchestrate the Spelling Reform of 1996. English, meanwhile, is one of the few major languages with no central regulatory body in charge of it for a variety of reasons, chief among which being that the US wouldn't (heck, already doesn't) recognize British "English" as official and vice-versa.
The cool part about English's decentralization is that it can adapt very quickly; the bad part, of course, is that it does adapt very quickly and frequently without thought. It's sort of like the difference between C++, where it takes over a decade to make any significant changes, and BASIC, which has several dialects, most of which are virtually indecipherable to one another, and changes according to the needs of whomever wishes to claim they "speak BASIC".
Actually, Japan is still cleaning up the mess from when its banking sector collapsed in the early '90s; it's a big part of the reason that Japan's public debt is nearly 200% of GDP. How did it collapse? Well, back in the late '80s, the Japanese were heavily speculating in... you guessed it... real estate.
As Mark Twain once said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Correct - instead of spending $1 trillion/year making war, we could instead spend an additional $1 trillion/year on various entitlements like Europe. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on your point of view, of course; many people would rather just keep the $1 trillion in their pockets and not redistribute it all over the place.
The reason we're (by "we", I mean everyone, not just the US) not spending a bunch of money on sending people to space is because, outside of a few die-hards on Slashdot and physics symposiums, nobody wants to. There are a variety of reasons for this - pure self-interest (spend the money on health care instead!), a lack of immediate return on investment in manned spaceflight (so, what did getting someone to the moon do for us, really?), high risks (the various Space Shuttle accidents) - but they're there.
The exciting thing about private space exploration is that it will finally give those with the capital and the desire to send people to space the opportunity to do so directly, instead of waiting for various bureaucracies to get into alignment. Will it get us into the moon anytime soon? No, but, once we get there, we're going to stay there.
Eh? Says who? Fraud is on the short list of things most libertarians (aside from the anarchist variety) believe is within the legitimate realm of the state to prevent.
Eh? Says who? Anarchist libertarians (aside from the american pseudo-anarchist variety) are Anti-Capitalists so they're clearly anti-fraud as well, since capitalism is an elaborate fraud in itself. They don't belive that a legitimate realm for the state exists at all, though.
Eh? Says who? Anarchism means "no archons," i.e. no rulers, not "no state," which would be called anocracy. Most real anarchists, as opposed to the circle-A crusty street punk variety, understand the need for some sort of state to protect and maintain individual freedoms.
Eh? Says who? No true Scotsman would suggest that it's possible to have a state without the state ruling someone, thus therefore becoming an "archon"!
I agree with most of them, though I'd personally replace "Silverlight" with "HTML5". I haven't seen too many people extol the virtues of Silverlight; on the other hand, I've run across more than a few people that swear that HTML5 will solve all of their problems, banish heretics (Flash, Silverlight, etc.), cure cancer, and so on. Of course, I am using the HTML5 YouTube beta, so I have nothing against the protocol; I'm just saying, let's wait for the standard to get finished and wait for some decent HTML5-capable development tools to show up before we all declare it to be the One True Multimedia Path, m'kay?
Imagine you have a thing for classic cars and so do all your friends and coworkers. One of the coworkers says that he just bought a sweet classic car - maybe an early '60s Riviera or something - for cheap and wants to sell it at "fair market value". One of your buddies hears about the deal and says, "Yeah, I'll do that!", then buys the car. However, the buddy thinks that the amount he paid for the car is too low; after a bit of research, he decides that this particular car might be worth more than the coworker thought. So, he puts in the paper at what he thinks is fair market value, along with an explanation of why he thinks the value of this car is what he thinks it is. Lo and behold, another coworker looks at the description and buys the car. Then he, in turn, tries to sell the Riviera for a profit, telling anyone who will ask that this particular car has nearly doubled in value over the past year, so clearly there's money to be made.
This continues for a while until suddenly the Riviera is out of buyers, at which point the last buyer of the car is effectively forced to do something that none of the other buyers have done - find out how the danged thing runs. If the last buyer is lucky, he'll have a sweet running Riviera on his hands and won't have to spend his life savings rebuilding it - this would be "creating wealth" (i.e. converting money to a productive car). If he's unlucky, he just got a Riviera with a rusted undercarriage, a fried transmission, and an engine with a cracked block - this would be "destroying wealth" (i.e. converting money to a non-productive lump of scrap iron).
IronPython would probably work, too. Bonus points for leveraging.NET. Of course, that only makes sense if you already have.NET installed on the machines; then again, it's kind of hard not to by now.
Right, which is why they did it. The average person will see that it's slower, grumble in frustration, and walk away. Tom's Hardware, on the other hand, went the extra mile, dug into the bits, figured out what the problem wasn't (Nvidia driver), figured out what the problem was (Compiz), then explained how they fixed it.
Ran into a similar situation with an old client of mine, only with more "hilarity" - basically, they had a consultant tell them that they could have a dirt cheap server, a bunch of thin clients, and save money. Queue one Pentium 4-powered server with software mirrored PATA(!!!) drives serving as a terminal server for over 30 people. Queue one Pentium 4-powered server quickly succumbing to the heat and wear that was generated from such a load. Queue one confused customer that was wondering why the company I worked for was suggesting they buy a server that cost three times as much (i.e. one with a SAS-driven RAID 5 and more RAM) as the one they "just got a year or two ago". Queue them telling us to get lost.
Queue them getting bought out by a competitor a year or two later, followed by the competitor rolling the former customer's IT into the competitor's IT infrastructure, since the competitor actually knew how to spec for growth and maintenance. I don't know who won on that one, but... yeah. Think about it.
Ditto this - plus, in a medium-sized office, you're probably not getting 10x24Gb/sec out of your server infrastructure anyway. Your network is only as fast as the slowest component you rely upon; at 10Gb/sec, you're starting to bump into the limits of your hard drives, especially if you have more than a handful of people hitting the same RAID enclosure simultaneously.
Well, the goal is always to pay your employees less, at least on a per-unit-of-production basis; that's why we can make more stuff with less people now. The reason the sorts of production you're listing is "sustainable" with a living wage is because they actually require skill - not just anyone can put a car together. On the other hand, women the world over can sew, which is why textile work doesn't pay much. It's the same market dynamic that explains why a brainless Geek Squad monkey makes $9/hour while a trained, knowledgeable IT Manager makes somewhere north of six times that.
Keep in mind here that part of the reason our low-end wages in the America are even remotely "livable" (and, I agree, it's pushing it) is because of dirt cheap off-shore labor. If we kept the jobs here, yeah, everyone would have more digits in their bank account, but everything would cost more. Clothes, for example, would either cost twice as much (or more) or they would be put together in illegal sweatshops. Many of our electronics would probably double in price, too. This doesn't get us started on what would happen to other consumer goods that presently rely on imported machines or parts to produce here (e.g. sewing machines, a lot of our industrial equipment, etc.).
Truth is, we've already been down that road - it was called the '70s. It didn't end well.
Slashdot Mirror
Similarly, I slept with your mom returns 2.1M results. Also, 910k results say your mom is a whore.
Seriously though, yeah, Google Confirmation Bias is an incredibly fun game to play.
Yep - government at all levels is full of stuff like that. Want to know why?
Transparency.
I'm dead serious. When you're dealing with the private sector, the end result is (usually) far more important than the process. Using your above example, the goal is to get you on a plane that takes you to the destination the company wants you to go to - as long as you get there, the only people that care how it gets paid for are the accountants. In government, however, it's much more important that we avoid fraud and waste in the process of purchasing plane tickets than it is that we actually get you on a plane. Government has to make sure that the process is "clean" and "transparent", meaning that you didn't purchase the plane ticket from a vendor because they bribed you, lobbied you, gave you special favors, or otherwise did anything that might give themselves an "unfair advantage" over other airline ticket vendors in the procurement process. Once the government has established that everything is clean and above board through the use of over 200 years of accumulated "rooting out waste" tradition, then and only then can the government actually think about buying an airline ticket for you.
Coincidentally, this is why government-provided goods and services drive a lot of libertarians absolutely nuts. It's not that government can't do the job - of course it can. It does it right now in a variety of areas (police, fire, schools, etc.). However, once you're done dealing with all of the other airline vendors' lobbying (we have to have a "level playing field", whether the vendors are at the same "level" or not), politicians looking to score cheap points by "eliminating waste and fraud", and just general bureaucratic inertia, something that should be fairly simple and straightforward (buy an airline ticket) becomes an inefficient multistage bureaucratic maze that lacks flexibility and costs ten times as much as it would if you or I grabbed our credit cards and bought a plane ticket ourselves.
First, as even your link attests, Republicans haven't used filibusters 3x as much as Democrats did - they're just on pace to, which is very different; keep in mind that many of those cloture votes were used to stall the health care bill. Also, if you take a look at another graph on your reference, you'll notice that cloture votes have been trending up for over a decade as both parties use every rule possible to get their agendas enacted and their opponents' agenda disrupted. It's because of this trend that senators of both parties have brought up the so-called "nuclear option" from time to time.
The insane part about those votes is that filibusters and 3/5 majorities have nothing to do with the Constitution. All the Constitution says is that the Senate has the right to set its own floor rules. The entire reason cloture exists at all is because somebody decided it was a good idea to throw it in over 200 years ago.
Then again, if you want some true madness, there's always the "disappearing quorum" trick.
My first word processor was WordStar as well, only it ran on an Apple //e equipped with a Microsoft CP/M Softcard. That said, I do seem to remember having a batch of stickers that you could apply to your keyboard that sort of mimicked Wordperfect's keyboard templates.
Somewhat similar situation here, only I report to the CEO. Then again, so does just about everyone else, so there you go. I think a lot of it depends on how much the person in charge likes to delegate.
Mmm... I doubt it. Keep in mind that the same people that blew those buildings up are also the same ones that boycotted Denmark over cartoons and assassinated Theo van Gogh. People like them aren't interested in what you do - your existence is offensive enough to their sensibilities.
Having said that, there's a reason people like them have as much support as they have. Part of it is some blowback to American "gunboat diplomacy". Part of it is due to political leaders in the Middle East needing a scapegoat to paper over the fact that, outside of oil revenues, their countries are corrupt kleptocracies with few opportunities for younger, non-politically connected individuals. When you get down to it, there's no simple answer. Would it help if the US backed off? Perhaps, but keep in mind that Israel backed off on the Palestinians after the Oslo accords - how'd that work out for them? What are they doing now?
The simple and sad truth, if there is one in the Middle East, is this: It's not all about the Americans. It's really not. Whether the US was doing anything stupid there or not, it'd still be a mess. It was a mess when the Ottomans ran the place, it was a mess when the British ran the place, it was even a mess when it ran itself during the Caliphate. As long as that's true, the mess will spill over from time to time and make a mess somewhere else.
Is that before or after they deconstruct the current cultural aporia?
Many languages have official government-sanctioned boards that determine what's "in" and what's "out", similar to a standardization board (IEEE or something similar). German, for example, has the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung, which helped orchestrate the Spelling Reform of 1996. English, meanwhile, is one of the few major languages with no central regulatory body in charge of it for a variety of reasons, chief among which being that the US wouldn't (heck, already doesn't) recognize British "English" as official and vice-versa.
The cool part about English's decentralization is that it can adapt very quickly; the bad part, of course, is that it does adapt very quickly and frequently without thought. It's sort of like the difference between C++, where it takes over a decade to make any significant changes, and BASIC, which has several dialects, most of which are virtually indecipherable to one another, and changes according to the needs of whomever wishes to claim they "speak BASIC".
No, Windows XP and IE6-only internal web applications prepares them for the corporate world. Let's not subject our children to such a fate.
Actually, Japan is still cleaning up the mess from when its banking sector collapsed in the early '90s; it's a big part of the reason that Japan's public debt is nearly 200% of GDP. How did it collapse? Well, back in the late '80s, the Japanese were heavily speculating in... you guessed it... real estate.
As Mark Twain once said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Correct - instead of spending $1 trillion/year making war, we could instead spend an additional $1 trillion/year on various entitlements like Europe. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on your point of view, of course; many people would rather just keep the $1 trillion in their pockets and not redistribute it all over the place.
The reason we're (by "we", I mean everyone, not just the US) not spending a bunch of money on sending people to space is because, outside of a few die-hards on Slashdot and physics symposiums, nobody wants to. There are a variety of reasons for this - pure self-interest (spend the money on health care instead!), a lack of immediate return on investment in manned spaceflight (so, what did getting someone to the moon do for us, really?), high risks (the various Space Shuttle accidents) - but they're there.
The exciting thing about private space exploration is that it will finally give those with the capital and the desire to send people to space the opportunity to do so directly, instead of waiting for various bureaucracies to get into alignment. Will it get us into the moon anytime soon? No, but, once we get there, we're going to stay there.
Eh? Says who? Fraud is on the short list of things most libertarians (aside from the anarchist variety) believe is within the legitimate realm of the state to prevent.
Eh? Says who? Anarchist libertarians (aside from the american pseudo-anarchist variety) are Anti-Capitalists so they're clearly anti-fraud as well, since capitalism is an elaborate fraud in itself. They don't belive that a legitimate realm for the state exists at all, though.
Eh? Says who? Anarchism means "no archons," i.e. no rulers, not "no state," which would be called anocracy. Most real anarchists, as opposed to the circle-A crusty street punk variety, understand the need for some sort of state to protect and maintain individual freedoms.
Eh? Says who? No true Scotsman would suggest that it's possible to have a state without the state ruling someone, thus therefore becoming an "archon"!
Also, Archon was a kick-ass game.
That is all.
I agree with most of them, though I'd personally replace "Silverlight" with "HTML5". I haven't seen too many people extol the virtues of Silverlight; on the other hand, I've run across more than a few people that swear that HTML5 will solve all of their problems, banish heretics (Flash, Silverlight, etc.), cure cancer, and so on. Of course, I am using the HTML5 YouTube beta, so I have nothing against the protocol; I'm just saying, let's wait for the standard to get finished and wait for some decent HTML5-capable development tools to show up before we all declare it to be the One True Multimedia Path, m'kay?
Oh, we can do better than that...
Imagine you have a thing for classic cars and so do all your friends and coworkers. One of the coworkers says that he just bought a sweet classic car - maybe an early '60s Riviera or something - for cheap and wants to sell it at "fair market value". One of your buddies hears about the deal and says, "Yeah, I'll do that!", then buys the car. However, the buddy thinks that the amount he paid for the car is too low; after a bit of research, he decides that this particular car might be worth more than the coworker thought. So, he puts in the paper at what he thinks is fair market value, along with an explanation of why he thinks the value of this car is what he thinks it is. Lo and behold, another coworker looks at the description and buys the car. Then he, in turn, tries to sell the Riviera for a profit, telling anyone who will ask that this particular car has nearly doubled in value over the past year, so clearly there's money to be made.
This continues for a while until suddenly the Riviera is out of buyers, at which point the last buyer of the car is effectively forced to do something that none of the other buyers have done - find out how the danged thing runs. If the last buyer is lucky, he'll have a sweet running Riviera on his hands and won't have to spend his life savings rebuilding it - this would be "creating wealth" (i.e. converting money to a productive car). If he's unlucky, he just got a Riviera with a rusted undercarriage, a fried transmission, and an engine with a cracked block - this would be "destroying wealth" (i.e. converting money to a non-productive lump of scrap iron).
That's economics in a nutshell.
Everyone knows that coreutil and man pages are all anyone needs. If grandma can't handle that, she needs to get off the Intervaxenbahn and go home!
IronPython would probably work, too. Bonus points for leveraging .NET. Of course, that only makes sense if you already have .NET installed on the machines; then again, it's kind of hard not to by now.
Right, which is why they did it. The average person will see that it's slower, grumble in frustration, and walk away. Tom's Hardware, on the other hand, went the extra mile, dug into the bits, figured out what the problem wasn't (Nvidia driver), figured out what the problem was (Compiz), then explained how they fixed it.
First person to count to "potato" wins!
I prefer a push-pop method of conversation myself. I was just pushing some info into the list - it's up to the reader to pop it out.
Well, at least it'll finally be playable somewhere.
Ran into a similar situation with an old client of mine, only with more "hilarity" - basically, they had a consultant tell them that they could have a dirt cheap server, a bunch of thin clients, and save money. Queue one Pentium 4-powered server with software mirrored PATA(!!!) drives serving as a terminal server for over 30 people. Queue one Pentium 4-powered server quickly succumbing to the heat and wear that was generated from such a load. Queue one confused customer that was wondering why the company I worked for was suggesting they buy a server that cost three times as much (i.e. one with a SAS-driven RAID 5 and more RAM) as the one they "just got a year or two ago". Queue them telling us to get lost.
Queue them getting bought out by a competitor a year or two later, followed by the competitor rolling the former customer's IT into the competitor's IT infrastructure, since the competitor actually knew how to spec for growth and maintenance. I don't know who won on that one, but... yeah. Think about it.
Ditto this - plus, in a medium-sized office, you're probably not getting 10x24Gb/sec out of your server infrastructure anyway. Your network is only as fast as the slowest component you rely upon; at 10Gb/sec, you're starting to bump into the limits of your hard drives, especially if you have more than a handful of people hitting the same RAID enclosure simultaneously.
Let's declare a war on it!
Well, the goal is always to pay your employees less, at least on a per-unit-of-production basis; that's why we can make more stuff with less people now. The reason the sorts of production you're listing is "sustainable" with a living wage is because they actually require skill - not just anyone can put a car together. On the other hand, women the world over can sew, which is why textile work doesn't pay much. It's the same market dynamic that explains why a brainless Geek Squad monkey makes $9/hour while a trained, knowledgeable IT Manager makes somewhere north of six times that.
Keep in mind here that part of the reason our low-end wages in the America are even remotely "livable" (and, I agree, it's pushing it) is because of dirt cheap off-shore labor. If we kept the jobs here, yeah, everyone would have more digits in their bank account, but everything would cost more. Clothes, for example, would either cost twice as much (or more) or they would be put together in illegal sweatshops. Many of our electronics would probably double in price, too. This doesn't get us started on what would happen to other consumer goods that presently rely on imported machines or parts to produce here (e.g. sewing machines, a lot of our industrial equipment, etc.).
Truth is, we've already been down that road - it was called the '70s. It didn't end well.
Ban subsidence agriculture on small, family-owned plots of land? Um... are you sure about this?