Posts by Destroy All Monsters 16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008
Clouder: Uh, everything's under control. Situation normal.
Customer: What happened?
Clouder: Uh, we had a slight SOAP malfunction, but uh... everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here now, thank you. How are you?
Customer: We're sending a lawyer up.
Clouder: Uh, uh... negative, negative. We had a data leak here now. Give us a few minutes to lock it down. Large leak, very dangerous.
Customer: Who is this? What's your SLA?
Clouder: Uh...
[Clouder slams down the VoIP phone]
Clouder: Boring conversation anyway. PFY!!!! WE'RE GONNA HAVE COMPANY!
I still don't know, but I know artist Moebius did an addy about it a long time ago, with Cindy Crawford riding the large "mouette à béton".
Monopolists who will press their monopoly advantage and good congressional connections on one side, socialistic "the same price for everyone and everyone gets the same shit" rainbow-colored hippies who think technology grows in bionic garden sheds and is a "human right" on the other.
Fschk that, give me multi-speed internet, but let competition reign!
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has just released its annual report on the growth of the regulatory State in the US, entitled ’10,000 Commandments’ (the full report can be downloaded here, pdf). If only it were just ’10,000 commandments’! In reality, there are far, far more, and they are growing like weeds year-in, year-out.
A few statistical highlights from 2013:
...Combined with $3.454 trillion in federal spending, Washington’s share of the economy now reaches 31 percent.
...Costs for Americans to comply with federal regulations reached $1.863 trillion in 2013. That is more than the GDPs of Canada or Australia.
...This is the 21st edition of Ten Thousand Commandments. In that time, 87,282 final rules have been issued. That’s more than 3,500 per year or about nine per day.
...The “Unconstitutionality Index” is the ratio of regulations issued by agencies compared to legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by the president. The ratio stood at 51 for 2013. That means there were 72 new laws and 3,659 new rules – 51 rules for every law, or a new rule every 2 ½ hours.
...Regulatory costs amount to an average of $14,974 per household – 23 percent of the average household income of $65,596 and 29 percent of the expenditure budget of $51,442. This exceeds every item in the household budget except housing – more than health care, food, transportation, entertainment, apparel, services, and savings. Some 63 departments, agencies and commissions have regulations in the pipeline.
...The 2013 Federal Register contains 79,311 pages, the fourth highest ever. The top two all-time totals are 81,405 pages in 2010 and 81,247 in 2011, both under Obama.
...The top six federal rule making agencies account for 49.3 percent of all federal rules. In 2013, these were the Departments of the Treasury, Commerce, Interior, Health and Human Services, and Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency.
...Small businesses pay more in per-employee regulatory costs. Firms with fewer than 20 employees pay an average of $10,585 per employee, compared to $7,755 for those with 500 or more employees.”
[snip]
In short, the monetary costs of regulations as calculated by CEI above probably don’t even come close to representing the actual costs in terms of lost opportunities, knowledge that has never been gained, and consumer satisfactions that will never be attained as a consequence. The statement that regulatory costs devour 29% of all household income is sobering enough as it is, but it cannot possibly convey how much economic progress has already been forever lost due to regulations.
I sure hope people are getting their money's worth. It is probably "unemployment" though.
Yep, it means the progressive doublethink that says "more taxes == something good occurs" can even be found where it shouldn't be found. "Something good" should probably be something different than bombs dropping on brown people, although recently, checking on Hillary, the Rices and Samantha make me think that this also counted as "good" by the progressives. So let's just say "something good" is not bridges to nowhere, roach motel hospitals, lavish resorts for Congressmen or a USPTO that hands out patents for confusing cats.
It's not like problem childs of a similar kind aren't already convinced that the public debt is not a problem because you can always print more money, so I fails to see what the hurry is in destroying wealthpaying more taxes. I guess when you don't have a model on how an economy works in the first place, anything goes.
The brand that popularized Pierre-Greenwald's Snowden leaks is only so 'edgy' and 'cool' because heroes like the PayPal 14 took direct action.
I just want /b/ to go away. Please? 4chan is safe now that the hack has been cleaned up, right?
There is ALSO that X-files episode "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'" (1996) where the following is said by a nerd character:
Well, hey, I didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage.
Tricky Dick had no money left, he farted it all out blowing up women and children and random AK wielding peasants in 'Nam (because the french failed to do so a bit earlier even though quite a few recycled german personnel was in their colonial army at that time).
There was so no money left that he went off the Gold standard. The frankly Death-Star sized chickens from THAT are presently coming home to roost btw. Enjoy the guano.
The political standoff between the US and Russia over the latter's antics in Ukraine
Dontcha mean the former's antics in Ukraine?
"Fuck the EU, we will have a nazi revolution emerging from this embassy ... AND GET AWAY WITH IT!"
It's an old US thing, practiced successfully in South America mainly. But now that everything is newly under the survey of the Monroe doctrine, things are a bit changey (though not much hopey).
"It's hypothetical revenue information, which is not the same," she pointed out.
It's 2014. Get with the times, lady. Hypothetical stock revenue, hypothetical tax revenue, hypothetical potential GDP, hypothetical pension payouts and wars which practically pay for themselves... THIS IS SUPERLAND! WE ARE LIVING IT!
However, what on earth is the build like of that undisclosed company, that lets its users of its laptops back up the data to private devices in the first place? Where are the controls around their sensitive data? Why is that laptop able to share with non-regulated networks like at home, at Starbucks etc....
Very young, I see.
You need to realize that not every company can be managed like a bank (cough CDs with depositor data transferred to Frau Merkel for extortion purposes cough) or the NSA (cough our sysop left with the goods cough) as some actually need to pull in money to finance the ultra-fortress behaviour from customers in the first place.
I can remember that even in a certain govern-mentally checked project with fat security requirement binders so terminally dull that your head would melt when you just looked at them, interesting data could be found in inappropriate places ... nothing untoward happened though. GnuPG was indeed applied to the highest security files (I never saw what was in there, probably the IP adresses of the SNMP endpoints)
This "easy share" feature is supposed to make passing information to other users more convenient, although it appears to be a little too convenient: miscreants aware of the "share everything" design flaw are scanning the public internet for vulnerable models, and grabbing sensitive stuff, it's claimed.
HA HA HA! SHOW THEM ONLINE!!
$8,000 buys lunch with the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke at a restaurant of his choice
Probably money that he lovingly printed himself a bit earlier!
And lest we forget:
“Bernanke Enjoys the ‘Fruits of the Free Market,’” or so we’re told in a Reuters headline from March 4 about the former Fed chairman’s 40-minute speech in Abu Dhabi for which he received, ahem, $250,000. In the Reuters author’s defense, he was only quoting a DC lobbyist who was defending the amount, and added, Bernanke “will personally experience supply and demand.”
Well, yes, it’s just supply and demand and all that. No big deal and if you don’t like it, you must have something against markets. Still, it would be nice (and a bigger deal) if these reporters would quote someone outside of the accepted intellectual class of the Boswash corridor so compromised by being among the primary beneficiaries of all the new money Chairman Ben and his comrades created, ex nihilo, when he wasn’t shooting baskets in the Marriner Eccles building. If they did, they might hear some healthy skepticism about these events in which top officials cash in on their “public service” via contacts with the very industries they benefited while in office.
George Stigler explained such paybacks in his capture theory of regulation for which he received (rightly) the Nobel Prize in Economics, although I’d say they are better explained by the phrase, “quid pro and here-you-go!”
Less-beholden observers might pause during Bernanke’s victory lap and note that the dollar has lost almost 30 percent of its value since he joined the Fed in 2002, and that’s only if you accept the lowball metrics used in official CPI statistics. It is likely twice that amount if price inflation is measured in more traditional ways, including forgotten factors such as the full inflation for out-of-pocket expenses or the cost to maintain a constant cost of living. Americans of 1977 may have had to suffer through bad hair and disco music, but at least they didn’t suffer discrepancies between (a) what they experienced the value of the dollars in their pockets to be and (b) what the government said it was. We do.
COUGH!
Stanislaw Lem - Ananke (from "More Tales of Pirx the Pilot")
Such was the brain, so overburdened with spurious tasks as to be rendered incapable of dealing with real ones, that stood at the helm of a hundred-thousand-tonner. Each of Cornelius’s computers was afflicted with the “anankastic syndrome”: a compulsion to repeat, to complicate simple tasks; a formality of gestures, a pattern of ritualized behavior. They simulated not the anxiety, of course, but its systemic reactions. Paradoxically, the fact that they were new, advanced models, equipped with a greater memory, facilitated their undoing: they could continue to function, even with their circuits overloaded.
Still, something in the Agathodaemon’s zenith must have precipitated the end—the approach of a strong head wind, perhaps, calling for instantaneous reactions, with the computer mired in its own avalanche, lacking any overriding function. It had ceased to be a real-time computer; it could no longer model real events; it could only founder in a sea of illusions… When it found itself confronted by a huge mass, a planetary shield, its program refused to let it abort the procedure, which, at the same time, it could no longer continue. So it interpreted the planet as a meteorite on a collision course, this being the last gate, the only possibility acceptable to the program. Since it couldn’t communicate that to the cockpit—it wasn’t a reasoning human being, after all—it went on computing, calculating to the bitter end: a collision meant a 100 percent chance of annihilation, an escape maneuver, a 90-95 percent chance, so it chose the latter: emergency thrust!
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