> They are run by engineers, who have achieved and maintained 100% industrial utilization by manipulating the exchange rate. That much is basically not in dispute.
> How that will work out, long run, is an open question. Things are interesting.
They've done tremendously well for 30 years and aren't going to stop. They started at the same level as democratic India and are now far more capable than India.
They don't think rule by high-IQ nationalist engineers is likely to start failing now. I wouldn't bet on it either. And they don't think that satisfying the emotional impulses of its citizenry is very important.
But in this case, the handset companies can sell their systems with software from other providers!
Nothing technically locks them down. The bundling is saying "Playstore and Google Search and the Android trademark is Google proprietary, if you want one you must get them all."
Google could probably get away with it if they charged money for Play Store, and credited that money back if loading Google Search.
There are plenty of iOS users who have money, there's plenty of motivation. There aren't as many hackers because it's not very rewarding. The OS and app infrastructure is more secure, and it limits application developers in cases.
No it's not a retirement fund, and the payouts are only very roughly correlated to what you put in, as opposed to investment funded pensions which are tightly correlated and accounted for.
There were non-working spouses who get SS based on their partner's income. And unlike a private retirement pension, the payouts to the primary are not reduced as a result.
Then SS Disability, and for people who have major biological defects and weren't ever going to be able to get a job.
And low income people in SS get more than they would otherwise, and high income pay more than they would get otherwise. Because once you're old and nobody wants to hire you, there was an essential risk about how well your life turned out. And the point of Social Security is written right in the name: Social Security. Not a savings account.
> Zuckerberg should take a look at Venezuela, Russia, much of Africa, and the Middle East. They too subscribe to the idea that state-run oil companies should share their wealth and create a wonderful paradise for everyone.
And Norway. Which actually does share the wealth and invested its money long term, and taxes the heck out of domestic petroleum consumption.
Problems with Venezuela, Angola and Russia and the Gulf states comes down to the "not really sharing very much at all" business.
> If we had a direct population vote as you insinuate, then Los Angeles alone would overwhelm all of the votes of Oklahoma and Wyoming which deprives those states of representation.
No, it gives them representation proportional to the number of people in them. Why should one person in Oklahoma matter so much more than one person in Los Angeles?
Votes matter everywhere, and there are many smaller states which in aggregate have a significant population. And there are plenty of areas of California whose businesses, attitudes, and needs are much more similar to Oklahoma than to Los Angeles, and their needs and their ability to have their votes add up with Oklahoma people's is being suppressed in the current system.
> There is a reason for the electoral college and it's states rights. If it wasn't in place 3 to 4 cities would dictate the vote from mainly 3 states and 47 other states wouldn't matter.
No. Why would it work that way? There is no winner-take-all in any level in a direct popular vote. 3 or 4 cities are NYC, 8.1 million, Los Angeles, 3.8 million, Chicago, 2.7 million, Houston, 2.1 million. 16.7 million. Even near doubling that for suburbs (which often vote distinctly opposite from the city), that's about 10%. The population of the USA is about 330 million.
And in those cities, without a winner take all, the minority candidate's votes also accumulate. Think about the 40% of conservatives in California, or the 40% of liberals in Texas. So even if the large cities vote for one candidate by 65 to 35%, a 30% difference (which is very large) that's 16.7 million * 0.3 = about 5 million votes. (I'm equating population to votes, but it should be roughly proportional).
In a direct popular vote, every vote matters, and candidates would campaign and try to appeal everywhere. Conservatives in New York. Liberals in Kansas. Everyone. Why should a few states in the current system (FL, OH, PA, MI) get to matter more than many other states?
When plants die and decay their embedded carbon usually goes back into the atmosphere. You'd need to harvest them and preserve them and sequester down deep underground in a sterile environment for geologically long timescales.
An ideal form of carbon sequestration is known as "coal".
When the plants which created current fossil fuels were living, bacteria and fungi had not evolved the ability to break down certain key parts of the plants. Today, they have. So we will never be able to go back.
In a hundred years, the mining and burning of coal will be regarded like the present generation regards slavery: unspeakably evil and known to be a usual part of commerce of the day to their shock. It will be a capital felony.
Uh no, even if all fossil CO2 emission were to cease immediately (and they are talking about the rate of increase stopping, not zero fossil emissions which is more than a century away), the atmospheric levels would continue to stay high for decades to hundreds of years thanks to the ocean, which has taken up a significant amount of fossil emitted carbon. At the moment, ocean and atmosphere are taking up extra carbon, ocean is absorbing some of the excess from the atmosphere.. Stop emitting to the atmosphere and chemical equilibrium puts the carbon from the ocean back in the atmosphere where it keeps on warming.
It is really a long time to get back to pre-fossil fuel climate.
The people with the skill and the motivation to manufacture firerarms and ammunition on their own is pretty minuscule. What is the chance my first time gun and first time ammunition will be anywhere near as good, reliable, powerful and safe (to the user) and dangerous (to the target) as something manufactured in a factory with quality materials?
And why doesn't this apply to explosives? Not many people killed in major bombings, because the materials are difficult to acquire and manufacture safely.
> You really are an indoctrinated idiot of you believe getting rid of one kind of weapon and leaving the other few thousand types is going to reduce the number of DEATHS any at all.
At all? No possible way? Why have a gun at all? If guns are heavily restricted, but there are a few thousand of ways to kill, why mourn the loss of one of a thousand which is supposedly irrelevant? You have plenty of weapons left.
Why not give toddlers (and cluelessly self righteous twenty something Libertarians) sarin to play with? Wait, less dangerous play-doh might reduce all-cause mortality of toddlers?
> Python is great for rapid prototyping and small scripts, but for large, complex systems I want both TDD and strong typing. At present, Java is probably the best language for such systems, when you consider availability of experienced staff, tooling and native features.
That's my experience as well. I work in what is now called "data science" (though I've been doing the same stuff for decades, back when it might have been called 'computational physics' or 'statistics' or whatever).
I find that even for initial development past a a hundred or two lines, I now prefer Java. Why? A simple, but universal and ubiquitous answer: just looking up the damn order and meaning of the arguments of a method.
For instance, in python data manipulation, which uses almost universally the Pandas library, built on numpy library, you could need to pass a DataFrame, a Series, or the underlying numpy array, or even lower level a built-in Python list as arguments (and they can be converted back and forth). I now have to look at my code at the called method to see which it was supposed to take and in what position.
With a typical Java IDE, I'd get feedback on the spot (red line) if I used the wrong one and a space would likely bring up the appropriate conversion method or a type-matching object reference.
Python does have many great libraries (though java isn't too bad at all) but I do not at all find it easier or faster to develop once a project is worth setting up a Java devel pipeline. Don't forget the cost to write all those tests which are much more necessary in Python than Java (and yes I have many more run-time errors with Python than Java).
Kotlin is a face-lifted & flab-tucked Java, compatible with all JVM libraries, and Scala is an interesting and sophisticated language with the same.
Personally, Fortran, and I mean modern Fortran 95+ is heavily underrated in usefulness. It still has by far the best array and matrix handling, many excellent intrinsic parallel constructions, an very good and ergonomic syntax (it went from the worst to the best with F90) for its purpose, and of course speed speed speed.
If it had been invented by some well funded Silicon Valley startup with a hipster web designer and partnered with nVidia as their native development platform for CUDA GPUs, it would be the considered the new hotness.
And it solved the Python indentation vs C/Java brace wars correctly: newlines are significant, tabs and space indentation is not.
if (cond) then
statement else if (cond2) then
statement else
statement endif
And there has been academic empirical research on syntax style and errors----that one won. (I think it is also what Ada did).
> What if the AlphaGo AI is so advanced, that it is toying with its opponent, and letting him near-win? What if it has the strength of "the Hulk" with the subtlety of Black Widow?
The algorithm is neither. As discussed frequently, it pursues the highest probability path to a win, not the highest winning margin. This means taking less risks when apparently ahead, which may look like "letting him near win" and "toying with him", by giving up small amounts of territory as long as those preclude lines of action by the opponent which would potentially open up more. In US football, consider giving up run yards in 4th quarter to preclude passing touchdowns.
There is no programming regarding an opponent's predicted emotional states.
> When President, Obama completely reversed his position and argued that Bush was right and he, as Senator, was wrong.
Yeah, something important economic happened in between 2006 and 2009. What was that?
In 2006 GWB administration despite a good, hot economy, had a huge deficit and debt thanks to multiple wars (only one was needed) and tax cuts to the wealthiest. It started with a budget in balance and almost surplus left by Clinton.
It's a lousy way to get rid of employees who are just coasting, because it doesn't do that and it pisses off the people who are left and demonstrates that the top leadership are incompetent assholes.
If you want to get rid of employees who are "just coasting", figure out who they are and especially who they aren't, and lay them off, and pay their ****ing severance, and think about who you want to keep and what you want to do with them.
It's Pirate Ship Captaincy 101: Employees will work well for nice management, or asshole management who are successful and will bring (some of) them along. Incompetent assholes on the top breed demotivated incompetence or asshole incompetence on the bottom.
Slashdot Mirror
> They are run by engineers, who have achieved and maintained 100% industrial utilization by manipulating the exchange rate. That much is basically not in dispute.
> How that will work out, long run, is an open question. Things are interesting.
They've done tremendously well for 30 years and aren't going to stop. They started at the same level as democratic India and are now far more capable than India.
They don't think rule by high-IQ nationalist engineers is likely to start failing now. I wouldn't bet on it either. And they don't think that satisfying the emotional impulses of its citizenry is very important.
> Productivity improvements have been occurring for a lot longer than 150 years.
The standard of living and productivity was about flat from 400 AD to 1600 AD.
Siemens quotes 2.6% losses for a 800 kV high voltage DC transmission line over 800 km. Nevada to NYC is 4000 km, so that would be about 13% loss.
> You lose massive amounts of electricity as you ship it from PA to NYC.
Empirical, not alternative, facts:
Siemens: 500kV high voltage DC transmission losses for 800km, 6%. 800kV? 2.6%.
https://www.siemens.com/press/pool/de/events/2012/energy/2012-07-wismar/factsheet-hvdc-e.pdf
Pittsburgh, on the east of Pennsylvania, to NYC, is 371 miles, about 600 kilometers, on the highway.
But in this case, the handset companies can sell their systems with software from other providers!
Nothing technically locks them down. The bundling is saying "Playstore and Google Search and the Android trademark is Google proprietary, if you want one you must get them all."
Google could probably get away with it if they charged money for Play Store, and credited that money back if loading Google Search.
There are plenty of iOS users who have money, there's plenty of motivation. There aren't as many hackers because it's not very rewarding. The OS and app infrastructure is more secure, and it limits application developers in cases.
Cut the pay of the iOS developers by the amount of the bug bounty.
No it's not a retirement fund, and the payouts are only very roughly correlated to what you put in, as opposed to investment funded pensions which are tightly correlated and accounted for.
There were non-working spouses who get SS based on their partner's income. And unlike a private retirement pension, the payouts to the primary are not reduced as a result.
Then SS Disability, and for people who have major biological defects and weren't ever going to be able to get a job.
And low income people in SS get more than they would otherwise, and high income pay more than they would get otherwise. Because once you're old and nobody wants to hire you, there was an essential risk about how well your life turned out. And the point of Social Security is written right in the name: Social Security. Not a savings account.
> Zuckerberg should take a look at Venezuela, Russia, much of Africa, and the Middle East. They too subscribe to the idea that state-run oil companies should share their wealth and create a wonderful paradise for everyone.
And Norway. Which actually does share the wealth and invested its money long term, and taxes the heck out of domestic petroleum consumption.
Problems with Venezuela, Angola and Russia and the Gulf states comes down to the "not really sharing very much at all" business.
BMW i3 with Range-Extender. I've had one for a week. Main propulsion is 170 hp, auxiliary charging is 33 hp. It does add about 300 lbs to a light car.
That's too high by factor of 10. Article quotes 23 miles per 100,000 driven. So 11.5 miles shorter after 50,000 miles, which is more reasonable.
> If we had a direct population vote as you insinuate, then Los Angeles alone would overwhelm all of the votes of Oklahoma and Wyoming which deprives those states of representation.
No, it gives them representation proportional to the number of people in them. Why should one person in Oklahoma matter so much more than one person in Los Angeles?
Votes matter everywhere, and there are many smaller states which in aggregate have a significant population. And there are plenty of areas of California whose businesses, attitudes, and needs are much more similar to Oklahoma than to Los Angeles, and their needs and their ability to have their votes add up with Oklahoma people's is being suppressed in the current system.
> There is a reason for the electoral college and it's states rights. If it wasn't in place 3 to 4 cities would dictate the vote from mainly 3 states and 47 other states wouldn't matter.
No. Why would it work that way? There is no winner-take-all in any level in a direct popular vote. 3 or 4 cities are NYC, 8.1 million, Los Angeles, 3.8 million, Chicago, 2.7 million, Houston, 2.1 million. 16.7 million. Even near doubling that for suburbs (which often vote distinctly opposite from the city), that's about 10%. The population of the USA is about 330 million.
And in those cities, without a winner take all, the minority candidate's votes also accumulate. Think about the 40% of conservatives in California, or the 40% of liberals in Texas. So even if the large cities vote for one candidate by 65 to 35%, a 30% difference (which is very large) that's 16.7 million * 0.3 = about 5 million votes. (I'm equating population to votes, but it should be roughly proportional).
In a direct popular vote, every vote matters, and candidates would campaign and try to appeal everywhere. Conservatives in New York. Liberals in Kansas. Everyone. Why should a few states in the current system (FL, OH, PA, MI) get to matter more than many other states?
When alarm is scientifically justified, alarmism is moral.
When plants die and decay their embedded carbon usually goes back into the atmosphere. You'd need to harvest them and preserve them and sequester down deep underground in a sterile environment for geologically long timescales.
An ideal form of carbon sequestration is known as "coal".
When the plants which created current fossil fuels were living, bacteria and fungi had not evolved the ability to break down certain key parts of the plants. Today, they have. So we will never be able to go back.
In a hundred years, the mining and burning of coal will be regarded like the present generation regards slavery: unspeakably evil and known to be a usual part of commerce of the day to their shock. It will be a capital felony.
Uh no, even if all fossil CO2 emission were to cease immediately (and they are talking about the rate of increase stopping, not zero fossil emissions which is more than a century away), the atmospheric levels would continue to stay high for decades to hundreds of years thanks to the ocean, which has taken up a significant amount of fossil emitted carbon. At the moment, ocean and atmosphere are taking up extra carbon, ocean is absorbing some of the excess from the atmosphere.. Stop emitting to the atmosphere and chemical equilibrium puts the carbon from the ocean back in the atmosphere where it keeps on warming.
It is really a long time to get back to pre-fossil fuel climate.
And of course the FSB would never, ever ever think to """bribe""" a Russian-based employee into a similar arrangement.
They put down crazy people with guns very effectively with attack helicopters and collective punishment against towns.
When Pakistan and US started to send military anti-armor missiles and infrared guided ground to air missiles, the Soviets had a problem.
Supposedly (c.f. Wikipedia) prior to mujaheddin getting the Stinger anti-air missile the USSR never lost a major battle and after, it never won one.
This is the fact of modern warfare: air power and air supremacy is victory.
Criminals are also lazy.
The people with the skill and the motivation to manufacture firerarms and ammunition on their own is pretty minuscule. What is the chance my first time gun and first time ammunition will be anywhere near as good, reliable, powerful and safe (to the user) and dangerous (to the target) as something manufactured in a factory with quality materials?
And why doesn't this apply to explosives? Not many people killed in major bombings, because the materials are difficult to acquire and manufacture safely.
> You really are an indoctrinated idiot of you believe getting rid of one kind of weapon and leaving the other few thousand types is going to reduce the number of DEATHS any at all.
At all? No possible way? Why have a gun at all? If guns are heavily restricted, but there are a few thousand of ways to kill, why mourn the loss of one of a thousand which is supposedly irrelevant? You have plenty of weapons left.
Why not give toddlers (and cluelessly self righteous twenty something Libertarians) sarin to play with? Wait, less dangerous play-doh might reduce all-cause mortality of toddlers?
> Python is great for rapid prototyping and small scripts, but for large, complex systems I want both TDD and strong typing. At present, Java is probably the best language for such systems, when you consider availability of experienced staff, tooling and native features.
That's my experience as well. I work in what is now called "data science" (though I've been doing the same stuff for decades, back when it might have been called 'computational physics' or 'statistics' or whatever).
I find that even for initial development past a a hundred or two lines, I now prefer Java. Why? A simple, but universal and ubiquitous answer: just looking up the damn order and meaning of the arguments of a method.
For instance, in python data manipulation, which uses almost universally the Pandas library, built on numpy library, you could need to pass a DataFrame, a Series, or the underlying numpy array, or even lower level a built-in Python list as arguments (and they can be converted back and forth). I now have to look at my code at the called method to see which it was supposed to take and in what position.
With a typical Java IDE, I'd get feedback on the spot (red line) if I used the wrong one and a space would likely bring up the appropriate conversion method or a type-matching object reference.
Python does have many great libraries (though java isn't too bad at all) but I do not at all find it easier or faster to develop once a project is worth setting up a Java devel pipeline. Don't forget the cost to write all those tests which are much more necessary in Python than Java (and yes I have many more run-time errors with Python than Java).
Kotlin is a face-lifted & flab-tucked Java, compatible with all JVM libraries, and Scala is an interesting and sophisticated language with the same.
Personally, Fortran, and I mean modern Fortran 95+ is heavily underrated in usefulness. It still has by far the best array and matrix handling, many excellent intrinsic parallel constructions, an very good and ergonomic syntax (it went from the worst to the best with F90) for its purpose, and of course speed speed speed.
If it had been invented by some well funded Silicon Valley startup with a hipster web designer and partnered with nVidia as their native development platform for CUDA GPUs, it would be the considered the new hotness.
And it solved the Python indentation vs C/Java brace wars correctly: newlines are significant, tabs and space indentation is not.
if (cond) then
statement
else if (cond2) then
statement
else
statement
endif
And there has been academic empirical research on syntax style and errors----that one won. (I think it is also what Ada did).
> Normal hybrids leave out the transmission and just use the gas engine to generate electricity
As far as I know, only the BMW i3 works like that---all other mainstream ones have a mechanical linkage to the wheels.
Using the battery lowers wear on the engine and friction brakes.
> What if the AlphaGo AI is so advanced, that it is toying with its opponent, and letting him near-win? What if it has the strength of "the Hulk" with the subtlety of Black Widow?
The algorithm is neither. As discussed frequently, it pursues the highest probability path to a win, not the highest winning margin. This means taking less risks when apparently ahead, which may look like "letting him near win" and "toying with him", by giving up small amounts of territory as long as those preclude lines of action by the opponent which would potentially open up more. In US football, consider giving up run yards in 4th quarter to preclude passing touchdowns.
There is no programming regarding an opponent's predicted emotional states.
> When President, Obama completely reversed his position and argued that Bush was right and he, as Senator, was wrong.
Yeah, something important economic happened in between 2006 and 2009. What was that?
In 2006 GWB administration despite a good, hot economy, had a huge deficit and debt thanks to multiple wars (only one was needed) and tax cuts to the wealthiest. It started with a budget in balance and almost surplus left by Clinton.
It's a lousy way to get rid of employees who are just coasting, because it doesn't do that and it pisses off the people who are left and demonstrates that the top leadership are incompetent assholes.
If you want to get rid of employees who are "just coasting", figure out who they are and especially who they aren't, and lay them off, and pay their ****ing severance, and think about who you want to keep and what you want to do with them.
It's Pirate Ship Captaincy 101: Employees will work well for nice management, or asshole management who are successful and will bring (some of) them along. Incompetent assholes on the top breed demotivated incompetence or asshole incompetence on the bottom.