Severing the employment/health insurance link once and for all is the only way the USA will get the business fluidity needed to compete in the modern world. Why should the executive of a startup, or any other company, have to waste bandwidth thinking about employee health care, or child care, or transportation, or retirement plans? Those are issues for society at large and should be resolved by society at large, not the business exec (who BTW is imminently under-qualified to make such decisions). He/She has a business to run, right? with enough product/marketing/financing decisions to fill the day.
"Engineers are now starting to get paid for their true value, which arguably has not been case for a long time, but it is now, and Google is at heart of this. Google discovered an algorithm change can generate another $100 million in revenue. So now companies are more willing to have superstars, and there are engineers at Goggle making tens of millions of dollars."
Car dealers already take in skimpy profits on new-car sales, as consumers are able to use the internet to find out what dealers pay for a car, plus the sales-based quarterly/yearly bonus money that the manufacturer gives them. So increasingly the negotiations are up-from-cost rather than down-from-sticker.
So the parts and service departments are where most of the money is made. But guess what? New cars don't need much service, used ones last a long time too, and parts are also available over the internet. A future with many electric cars also suggests that parts & service will see declining revenues.
Younger generations aren't into cars the way older ones were, so the "superconsumers" are going away. Add all this up and I just don't see how the industry will support anywhere near the number of car dealers that it did in decades past. Getting rid of Pontiac, Hummer, etc. removed some capacity but there's still a long way to shrink.
It's the CEO's job to forsee and avoid strategic dead-ends. Many aren't so good at it.
As a Linux fanboy since 1994, UNIX and OS/2 guy before that, I was aghast when corpoations picked Win 3.1 on what, DOS 5.0? as a standard. "But X Windows is so much more modular, flexible, and portable! You can even run it on DOS machines!" I was right of course, and Win 3.1 standardizers spent much more hidden money on virus problems than it ever would have cost to get things going with Linux in the 1990's.
The best start companies can make to solve their jam-up is to modularize their old systems using the old tech. Then they can slowly replace bits and pieces with more modern, open, standards-based solutions -- Python? it has a small footprint -- at their leisure. When everything possible has been moved to portable tech, find a way -- virtual machines, emulation -- to move the last pieces. Now at last you can run on a modern OS -- any modern OS, you're not stuck any more.
I see companies making the same mistakes today by standardizing on.NET, the iPhone, and the iPad, with the same uncomfortable vendor lock-in and inability to move to cheaper and more robust platforms as they become available.
The reason companies get jammed up this way is their corporate culture. Short-term thinking has been identified in many posts here. Another factor is, simply, inflexible fear-based, cog-in-the-machine, just-tell-me-what-to-do employees. The bigger and more stable the institution, the more attractive it is to such people. Great, as long as the world doesn't change, which it seems to be doing faster and faster these days.
If the corporation itself was more modular and standards-based, it too would be more flexible, able to outsource, delegate, disentangle various business processes. Do we really need all the departments that our inflexible old software supports? Order fulfillment, customer service, marketing, manufacturing, design, bookkeeping -- all can be outsourced. We may choose to keep these functions in house, but let's define the interfaces between departments and their supporting IT, so that it's modular and we have flexibility in the future.
Have the realism and courage to state that the economy, being based on finite natural resources, can't grow forever, or even much longer. We were 20 years behind the curve in responding to global warming, which is just one more clue that we're f*cking up a nice place to live. Let's not stay in denial about the fallacy of perpetual growth and the immorality of waste, and develop policies that acknowledge it -- consumption taxes being a great starting point.
As tribal family groups we're capable of living in a tremendous range of environments, even when riddled by disease and beset by violence. All that's required is for people to live a few years past the start of their ability to breed. Before industry, technology, and development are able to ruin every ecosystem for human habitation, industry, technology, and development themselves will collapse. People from near the north pole to the south seas will then carry on as hunter/gatherers and simple agriculturalists, just as they did for hundreds of thousands of years before civilization. And, of course, living in social isolation, the groups will evolve their own languages and beliefs, and therefor tend toward war when they interact.
The problem isn't the mass, it's the surface area. Fewer thicker bags affect the environment less than more thinner bags. And half-decent people *are* walking into the stores with reused bags.
Tanenbaum's Structured Computer Organization takes a similar approach, going from the boolean logic of a transistor gate up to the OS and application level. I took a class with the first edition of Tanenbaum's book as the text in 1983 and l learned more about computers from it than from any other class before or since.
Separate from the issue of Cash for Clunkers taking used cars off of the market (and with them their maintenance cost and poor gas mileage), note that the poor suffer disproportionately from the effects of air pollution. So if removing cheap old stink-bombs from the road hurts the poor in one way, it may help them in a much more important way.
Isn't this airbag mess more an example of the free market in action? Just like letting Huwei build our telecom equipment? And didn't the government just quash that particular bit of business?
Such pictures may help people appreciate the oceans more, and Tel Aviv more too for that matter. Maybe we won't travel as much, but we may come to a greater appreciation of what we have.
Models make a person think. They require some analysis of the situation. That's why they're built by experts -- and why they help develop experts. So whatever a model says, if someone has been working on it for, say, a few months, then I know that they have a much deeper understanding of the field of study than, say, an arbitrary Slashdot know-it-all.
Wouldn't it be easier to shoot *you* for a large cut than all of those pesky folks for a small cut? Yes, and that's why so many crimes are inside jobs, and why empires from nation-sized to family-sized crack in times of stress.
As for starvation being a motivator, God what an ignorant remark. The starving, well, they starve, and experience just the apocalypse that we're talking about here. Why haven't Somalis or Chinese peasants invented the next great thing? The green revolution and other ideas that have kept westerners from starving for the last 80 years were all invented by the non-starving -- people with insight, such as those that have been sounding the alarm, for decades, about rising population intersecting the bounty of a declining environment. "It can't happen to me" isn't much of a policy tool.
Whew, wish I could find the link. But a study discussed some years ago on Slashdot found that for every $1 billion spent on defense and space R&D, there was a benefit equivalent to $200 million being spent on civilian-oriented research. Like, we might have wanted a microwave oven anyhow, without building a rocket to need one.
So yes, space R&D isn't a complete waste of money. It's an 80% waste of money.
In the end, you cannot convince people who do not want to challenge their presuppositions and assertions. What will happen in the future, is that we will continue to move on and embrace exciting new advances, technologies, medicines that stem from biology, while those who do not understand it will simply be left behind.
Maybe such people will be left behind, like people in dictatorships, whether the dicatorship is religious or secular. But since "smart idiots" are interwoven into the fabric of powerful nations, maybe they'll embroil the world in war, purge the intellectuals, burn the (digital) libraries, and send us back to the Middle Ages. It's happened before. In fact closed-mindedness is the only type of mentality that *can* cause war and oppression. Welcome to the good fight, for the rest of your life -- the struggle for freedom in, or despite, reality.
In time of peace, war goods go missing at all stages of the development process -- design, prototyping, demos and trade shows, manufacturing, delivery, storage and use by the armed services and our supposed allies. In time of war, it's left behind on the battlefield, shot over the enemy's borders, sunk into the deep blue sea. The military does it's best to control access but only 100% will do, and that's impossible. So backdoors are a bad thing.
It continues to amaze me that safety-critical controls -- headlights, wipers, and horn -- aren't standardized. Go from a GM vehicle to a Ford, have an oncoming car splash muddy water over your windshield, and see how fast you can find the wipers. I'm glad the NHTSA is doing *something*, but why aren't these primary controls standardized?
Slashdot Mirror
Severing the employment/health insurance link once and for all is the only way the USA will get the business fluidity needed to compete in the modern world. Why should the executive of a startup, or any other company, have to waste bandwidth thinking about employee health care, or child care, or transportation, or retirement plans? Those are issues for society at large and should be resolved by society at large, not the business exec (who BTW is imminently under-qualified to make such decisions). He/She has a business to run, right? with enough product/marketing/financing decisions to fill the day.
Damn those mass delusions!
"Engineers are now starting to get paid for their true value, which arguably has not been case for a long time, but it is now, and Google is at heart of this. Google discovered an algorithm change can generate another $100 million in revenue. So now companies are more willing to have superstars, and there are engineers at Goggle making tens of millions of dollars."
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319417
Maybe the genes didn't mutate but were somehow forced into commonality by similar ancestral proto-ecolocation behavior.
Car dealers already take in skimpy profits on new-car sales, as consumers are able to use the internet to find out what dealers pay for a car, plus the sales-based quarterly/yearly bonus money that the manufacturer gives them. So increasingly the negotiations are up-from-cost rather than down-from-sticker.
So the parts and service departments are where most of the money is made. But guess what? New cars don't need much service, used ones last a long time too, and parts are also available over the internet. A future with many electric cars also suggests that parts & service will see declining revenues.
Younger generations aren't into cars the way older ones were, so the "superconsumers" are going away. Add all this up and I just don't see how the industry will support anywhere near the number of car dealers that it did in decades past. Getting rid of Pontiac, Hummer, etc. removed some capacity but there's still a long way to shrink.
It's the CEO's job to forsee and avoid strategic dead-ends. Many aren't so good at it.
As a Linux fanboy since 1994, UNIX and OS/2 guy before that, I was aghast when corpoations picked Win 3.1 on what, DOS 5.0? as a standard. "But X Windows is so much more modular, flexible, and portable! You can even run it on DOS machines!" I was right of course, and Win 3.1 standardizers spent much more hidden money on virus problems than it ever would have cost to get things going with Linux in the 1990's.
The best start companies can make to solve their jam-up is to modularize their old systems using the old tech. Then they can slowly replace bits and pieces with more modern, open, standards-based solutions -- Python? it has a small footprint -- at their leisure. When everything possible has been moved to portable tech, find a way -- virtual machines, emulation -- to move the last pieces. Now at last you can run on a modern OS -- any modern OS, you're not stuck any more.
I see companies making the same mistakes today by standardizing on .NET, the iPhone, and the iPad, with the same uncomfortable vendor lock-in and inability to move to cheaper and more robust platforms as they become available.
The reason companies get jammed up this way is their corporate culture. Short-term thinking has been identified in many posts here. Another factor is, simply, inflexible fear-based, cog-in-the-machine, just-tell-me-what-to-do employees. The bigger and more stable the institution, the more attractive it is to such people. Great, as long as the world doesn't change, which it seems to be doing faster and faster these days.
If the corporation itself was more modular and standards-based, it too would be more flexible, able to outsource, delegate, disentangle various business processes. Do we really need all the departments that our inflexible old software supports? Order fulfillment, customer service, marketing, manufacturing, design, bookkeeping -- all can be outsourced. We may choose to keep these functions in house, but let's define the interfaces between departments and their supporting IT, so that it's modular and we have flexibility in the future.
Have the realism and courage to state that the economy, being based on finite natural resources, can't grow forever, or even much longer. We were 20 years behind the curve in responding to global warming, which is just one more clue that we're f*cking up a nice place to live. Let's not stay in denial about the fallacy of perpetual growth and the immorality of waste, and develop policies that acknowledge it -- consumption taxes being a great starting point.
As tribal family groups we're capable of living in a tremendous range of environments, even when riddled by disease and beset by violence. All that's required is for people to live a few years past the start of their ability to breed. Before industry, technology, and development are able to ruin every ecosystem for human habitation, industry, technology, and development themselves will collapse. People from near the north pole to the south seas will then carry on as hunter/gatherers and simple agriculturalists, just as they did for hundreds of thousands of years before civilization. And, of course, living in social isolation, the groups will evolve their own languages and beliefs, and therefor tend toward war when they interact.
The problem isn't the mass, it's the surface area. Fewer thicker bags affect the environment less than more thinner bags. And half-decent people *are* walking into the stores with reused bags.
FYI
> I hope they take advantage of the marketing possibilities offered by civet-processed coffee.
Just had a bit too much to drink...
Tanenbaum's Structured Computer Organization takes a similar approach, going from the boolean logic of a transistor gate up to the OS and application level. I took a class with the first edition of Tanenbaum's book as the text in 1983 and l learned more about computers from it than from any other class before or since.
Separate from the issue of Cash for Clunkers taking used cars off of the market (and with them their maintenance cost and poor gas mileage), note that the poor suffer disproportionately from the effects of air pollution. So if removing cheap old stink-bombs from the road hurts the poor in one way, it may help them in a much more important way.
Isn't this airbag mess more an example of the free market in action? Just like letting Huwei build our telecom equipment? And didn't the government just quash that particular bit of business?
The share of Chinese imports gets substantially higher when you subtract oil from the total, at $400-500 billion per year.
Since Linus is speaking honestly, he makes the entire community look good.
Such pictures may help people appreciate the oceans more, and Tel Aviv more too for that matter. Maybe we won't travel as much, but we may come to a greater appreciation of what we have.
>This method is not recommended for controlling the audio output of animals or children.
Why'd you leave women off the list?
You're expressing a strong opinion about a highly technical subject that you know nothing about. It will only be karma when your boss does the same.
Ah, you're talking about the Bush administration again. Strong opinions, shallow knowledge. Yes, the karma's hell.
Models make a person think. They require some analysis of the situation. That's why they're built by experts -- and why they help develop experts. So whatever a model says, if someone has been working on it for, say, a few months, then I know that they have a much deeper understanding of the field of study than, say, an arbitrary Slashdot know-it-all.
Wouldn't it be easier to shoot *you* for a large cut than all of those pesky folks for a small cut? Yes, and that's why so many crimes are inside jobs, and why empires from nation-sized to family-sized crack in times of stress.
As for starvation being a motivator, God what an ignorant remark. The starving, well, they starve, and experience just the apocalypse that we're talking about here. Why haven't Somalis or Chinese peasants invented the next great thing? The green revolution and other ideas that have kept westerners from starving for the last 80 years were all invented by the non-starving -- people with insight, such as those that have been sounding the alarm, for decades, about rising population intersecting the bounty of a declining environment. "It can't happen to me" isn't much of a policy tool.
Whew, wish I could find the link. But a study discussed some years ago on Slashdot found that for every $1 billion spent on defense and space R&D, there was a benefit equivalent to $200 million being spent on civilian-oriented research. Like, we might have wanted a microwave oven anyhow, without building a rocket to need one.
So yes, space R&D isn't a complete waste of money. It's an 80% waste of money.
In the end, you cannot convince people who do not want to challenge their presuppositions and assertions. What will happen in the future, is that we will continue to move on and embrace exciting new advances, technologies, medicines that stem from biology, while those who do not understand it will simply be left behind.
Maybe such people will be left behind, like people in dictatorships, whether the dicatorship is religious or secular. But since "smart idiots" are interwoven into the fabric of powerful nations, maybe they'll embroil the world in war, purge the intellectuals, burn the (digital) libraries, and send us back to the Middle Ages. It's happened before. In fact closed-mindedness is the only type of mentality that *can* cause war and oppression. Welcome to the good fight, for the rest of your life -- the struggle for freedom in, or despite, reality.
In time of peace, war goods go missing at all stages of the development process -- design, prototyping, demos and trade shows, manufacturing, delivery, storage and use by the armed services and our supposed allies. In time of war, it's left behind on the battlefield, shot over the enemy's borders, sunk into the deep blue sea. The military does it's best to control access but only 100% will do, and that's impossible. So backdoors are a bad thing.
It continues to amaze me that safety-critical controls -- headlights, wipers, and horn -- aren't standardized. Go from a GM vehicle to a Ford, have an oncoming car splash muddy water over your windshield, and see how fast you can find the wipers. I'm glad the NHTSA is doing *something*, but why aren't these primary controls standardized?