Posts by Tom 13

Re: learn how to weld and spraypaint.

I could have done with a bit of welding exposure in high school. It's one of those things I'd like to know how to do beyond theoreticals that I haven't. And lacking an appropriate instructor have never done.

Re: The man is correct

I spent 3 years of high school learning Latin, 3 learning Spanish, 1 learning Greek. I spent 2 semesters of college learning German.

I do not use Latin, Spanish, Greek, or German in any of my day to day activities. It was not however a waste of time. I learned a fair bit. Some about culture, a bunch about my own language, and some about the etymology of words.

Re: @Stuart Longland

everybody is the same =/= seriously say that some kids cannot pick up logical thought

Re: arehole

You should have finished reading the article. I had a similar initial gut reaction, but Torvalds clarification at the end makes it clear he thinks all kids should be exposed to programming. It may be that as a professional programmer he has a somewhat different definition of "programming" than you or I do, and that, like his coding standards, it is somewhat higher that of a political carbon emitter.

Re: Tiamat hates trains.

That should be "with her." And I think you just did. Given that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, you might want to start making apologies as quickly as possible. It might also be a good idea to alert your friends so they don't also get caught up in the mess you just created.

Re: Driverless car

Justifying train drivers (in the passenger context) is already difficult, especially in the US.

For example, I live in the DC metropolitan area which of course named their German engineered light rail Metro. In June of 2009 there was a collision because of a failure of in the automatic driving system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_on_the_Washington_Metro scroll for image). I say failure of the system in as much as sensors on the tracks weren't relaying information properly (Metro knew about potential issues, IIRC they thought they had just finished installing a fix, but the problem continued). Since that time they've had all the trains on the system running under manual control. This has resulted in jerkier stops as well as significantly increased wear on the breaking mechanisms. I'd rather the trains were back under the automatic controls and Metro had fixed their damn sensor system properly. No, I'm not discounting the 9 dead and 70 injured (I have a friend who was injured in the incident but wasn't part of that 70 person count). Just over 5months after they switched to manual control they had another collision incident. Only for that accident they got lucky. It was an out of service train at the rail lot and moving at slow speeds. I don't think a person at the wheel would have helped in the June incident. He would have been relying on the same signal that failed to be transmitted to automated system.

I've casually followed the fallout from this incident and it is revealing of how disasters like this take place. It isn't an unlucky combination of unfortunate coincidences. Metro knew they had sensor problems for several years. They claim they are underfunded and can't make the needed repairs. Meanwhile their overtime logs show workers consistently logging 60+ hours a week, with some key positions logging over 100 hours a week on a consistent basis. Even if I don't want a French work week, I recognize that consistently logging 60 hours a week means you're getting sub-optimal performance from a worker. Logging more than 70 is insane and except in cases of dire emergency no one should ever work a single 100 hour week (if they do it should be followed by a week of mandatory leave for recuperation). Next up we have the passenger cars. I think they have about 4 varieties of cars (1000, 5000, 7000, 8000). The NTSB issued safety warnings for the 1000 over 5 years before the accident. The problem, exactly the kind of car separation you'll see in the wiki picture. To this day, those cars are still in the trains, but Metro has updated their SOP to use them "only in the middle, not on the ends." What we have is a long list of known problems that ultimately resulted in the deaths of 9 people and injury of 70 more.

Whether the car is driven by a program or a person doesn't matter half as much as not ignoring known problems. In fact, I expect the car being driven by the program will work out to be a lot more like a server in the data center: you might get a person to work in 90F and 90% humidity, but the servers are kept in air conditioned room. Likewise if the safety measures aren't enabled, the program won't drive.

Re: The fairest system

The only 100% defensible system is one where you pay for those services you use. So I wouldn't even say everyone paying X is fair, because some will use more and others will use less. You'd also get a fair bit of argument over whether certain services that function like a societal level insurance policy are "used" by people. I think the closest approximation we'll get of that is a flat income tax, where everything that is effectively income is taxed. Theoretically you'd do better with a consumption tax, but I see the consumption tax ultimately being distorted in the same way the progressive income tax is.

Re: Taxin incomes is both immoral and ineffective.

20% of a bottom-end earner's salary is much more important to him than 20% of a high earner's salary.

So you deny the meaning of "marginal income" and therefore a key tenet of economics. No wonder you reason so badly.

Re: The welfare state and the lack of influence of the ordinary person

Consider a housewife in Texas

Please introduce me to all of these housewives. Can't? Thought not. Next strawman please.

Why is it that the top of the market must accomodate the Laffer curve through increased wages but bottom of the market must accomodate it through reduced benefits?

Well, for one thing the guy getting the bonuses for being the CEO is working. The guy at the bottom sucking up benefits isn't. If you can't wrap your head around this fact you are incapable of doing even rudimentary economic analysis.

preventative care turns out to be cheaper than crisis care.

I've heard that urban myth. Turns out it isn't true, which is probably the only good thing to come out of 0bamacare. It's why they wanted to discourage women from getting mammograms. The bits about the radiation effects on health were all just smoke and mirrors.

Note that doesn't mean I think we'd all be better off using crisis care over preventative. Just that it might actually be more costly, and that being the case you have to figure out how to pay for it.

Re: Taxin incomes is both immoral and ineffective.

Not quite. Progressively taxing incomes is both immoral and ineffective. It deters generation of more working opportunities which are the real destroyers of poverty.

While I like the idea of taxing consumption because of it's economic efficiency, I've given up on it as a good from a societal standpoint. Do that and you allow the politicians to segment society and set those segments against one another. The only way to keep the politicians from doing that is to ensure that everyone is equally at risk for the politicians bad decisions. That means a flat tax on income. What we do need is a new set of laws that enable one to tax people who use otherwise properly excluded money streams to support their lives. Something along the lines of, if you don't have a taxed income, that business reimbursement counts as income. Also the values paid to healthcare and retirement plans needs to count as income.

Re: I'm fine with the wealthy paying a bit more (in the U.S.) than they do now...

Excluding your title and first paragraph the rest of your points are fine.

The problem is your title and first paragraph. What's worse is, even though you won't see it, they are the reasons for the rest of your observations.

Re: Not sure I agree

For example we have not access to pensions until we can recieve them and only if we use them to subsist.

Just last month I used my 401(k) retirement account to take out a loan against the principal to pay off around $20K of high interest credit card debt. The loan will be less than half what I was paying and I'll be paying half of it to myself. That sounds like wealth to me. It certainly is helping my financial condition. By the end of the year I'll have cleared the last of my high interest cards and will be saving for the down payment on my next car.

Furthermore, if I die in a train crash on my way home from work, that retirement account would be divided amongst my heirs exactly as would a bank account.

Not having control over something doesn't exclude it from being wealth. For example, if I were a venture capitalist putting money into a start up, one of the likely clauses in the investment is that I wouldn't be able to sell my shares for 5, 10, or maybe even 15 years. Even then, if I am a significant stockholder, there might be rules that I cannot sell a significant portion of my shares without the approval of the Officers of the corporation and the Board of Directors. That doesn't make it any less wealth than if I had publicly traded shares. But I certainly wouldn't have control over them in the sense you are demanding for pensions.

Excluding these forms of wealth for the so called poor only for the purpose of making them look poorer than they are in unethical. In fact it reveals the truly authoritarian intent of the Progs who engage in it.

Re: who've got their cash out of the weird and unsustainable way

Well, if you believe the Progs, they are little different than the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age.

In terms of absolute numbers, those are probably going up. In terms of per capita, I'm not so sure. Certainly as you trace back through history the kleptocrats and mass murders made similarly large (possibly larger on a relative basis) amounts of money.

None of which invalidates your concluding sentence. Rather I would say it enforces it. I think we made decent progress these last 250 years. It would be a pity to throw away not only them but the 400 which preceded them on the ludicrous theories of a Marxists from France.

Re: Speaking as an American

On this side of the pond, income for the masses has been stagnant since about 1974, while prices have continued to rise.

In 1987 when I first entered the real workforce I earned about $20K. Right now I'm north of $55K. My roomie, who works for the government started a bit above me and in now pulling down north of $80K. I use her as a rough approximation because her job is an actual engineering job, not a service one like mine. That looks pretty good to me. If you can't get your starting data correct your thesis isn't worth evaluating.

Re: AC Another "stop picking on the rich" article

Marx, DeSoto, Keynes, Friedman, Samuelson, Krugman, are not a waste of time, they are quite an interesting read.

DeSoto and Freidman yes. Not the others. Especially not Marx, who isn't even quoted by Marxists and when it comes to bad is second only to the poetry of Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Sussex.

Re: Another "stop picking on the rich" article

Simple arithmetic fact: earning £100K/year for 10 years does not make you a millionnaire.

If you think that, you need to go back to elementary school and learn simple arithmetic facts. If you put away 10K at 10% interest, you will be a millionaire in 26 years. If you earn 15%, it drops to 20 years. Put away 20K/yr at 10% and it takes 19 years. If you earn 15%, only 16.

I've been a piker most of my life. From age 22 to 40 I never put away more than $5K in my retirement account. Hell even now I'm barely putting in that much. Back about 5 years ago I was RIFfed from a job I'd held for 12 years. The value of my rollover was well north of $100K. Also, if you assume costs are rising you must also assume wages are rising. You don't get to vary one value without needing to estimate other values.

This, to paraphrase Ronnie, is the fundamental problem of progressives: so much of what they think they know simply isn't so.

Re: Another "stop picking on the rich" article

5. Karl Marx - Das Kapital, 1867, Gateway Books reprint from 1996.

And right there is where everybody knows you are lying through your teeth and out your butt at the same time. NOBODY reads Das Kapital. They read the Cliff Notes or another economist's abridged version because it's crap, long, crap, boring, and crap.

Re: Another "stop picking on the rich" article

This is not an option available to people at the bottom who do not have the surplus income to get in to the wealth generation business

Bullshit. I am by no means rich. A bit above the median income for the US, but then again I live and work in the DC metropolitan area so my costs are correspondingly larger. From the time I joined the real work force I've been putting surplus income into wealth generation. Not much at first, more as I've moved up the ladder. What has screwed me over were my own stupid mistakes that were the result of my own failure at self-control when necessary. All you have to do is hold expenses less than income and you have money to invest. That's as true at $20,000 as it is at $50,000, and $5,000,000. Just look at all the music megastars who wound up in bankruptcy court because they didn't know how to do it or read a contract.

Re: AC wrong type of regression curve

Another Leftie myth! The top 10% of earners pay more than half of ALL taxes, therefore the top 10% did the majority of the bailing out. The bottom 20-odd% paid bugger all. And this after the typical bottom 20-odd% of voters helped vote in the socialist morons that caused the crash! Do you seriously think many of the top 10% voted Labour?

While that's all true, much of what he said is true as well. It was a bunch of 1%ers who cause the housing market crash and all the rest of us working stiff, including 90% of the top 10% and probably 90% of the top 1% bailed them out.

As for how many of the top 10% voted Labour... More than I'd like, and a hell of a lot more than acknowledge it. Even in Britain campaigns and lobbying cost money. That money is almost certainly coming more from the top 10% than the other 90%.

I was rather sad to see the Conservatives not reversing it

The problem with jiggering a key economic number badly is that once it's been badly jiggered there are a lot of people (many of them important) who are looking to fob off their bad investments before it becomes recognized that the numbers were jiggered badly.

@ Chris Wareham

I don't live in the UK so I have no idea what your prices are like. I do live near DC. DC and London have something in common. They are both the capitals of their nations. As such the filthiest dogs of all congregate there (according to Twain "America's only native criminal class", I'm sure you've a similar quote from a similarly regarded bard). As unlike real capitalists all they need do is raise taxes to increase their salaries, or worse raise fears to increase lobbying income, the economies of the local region are quite disconnected from reality and only the gravest of dangers can return them to considering the real world. Median household income over hear for last year was a bit over $51,000. Median house price in DC was $460,000. Not quite as out of whack as your numbers, but it is the same effect.

Re: Simple Question

Greed and Envy. They'll put on a wonderful stage show full of sound and fury claiming they are doing it for the good of the downtrodden, but don't believe it. The point of your question is exactly the one the flat taxers have been making since Reagan presided on this side of the pond and Maggie on yours.

After thinking about it long and hard, I've concluded that with the possible exception of instance where the amount of money collected was less than the amount of money it cost to process, the person needs to be paying taxes. Not because the government needs their coppers, but because the 5 coppers collected from the poor man will be as precious to him as 1000K collected from the rich man is to the him. That gives them equal cause to watch the pigs at the spending trough like a falcon.

Re: Salary versus Equity

I think that a very solid line should be drawn between those who are paid a salary regardless of whether they perform excellently, adequately or badly

And those who founded a business and own some or all of the equity in that business.

That's the rub though isn't it?

There are a lot of people out there who think Sam Walton didn't do that even though he started out with just one store. Conversely there are a lot of people who think Warren Buffet and George Soros deserve every penny they make despite decent evidence that Sam Walton put a hell of a lot more sweat equity into his business than they did into theirs.

Progressive taxation is envy/greed dressed up in hypocritical sanctimony. Tax everybody at the same flat rate so everybody has equal marginal risk in the game when bad decisions are made. Part of the reason the freeloaders get away with the continuing expansion of the welfare state is they have no marginal costs in expanding it, only marginal benefits.

Re: those at the bottom aren't too badly off or too angry about it.

If you and your friend are running from one tiger, you may only have to run faster than your friend to survive. When you and your friends are running from more tigers than you've counted, it is likely you will eventually run out of friends to feed to the tiger. The modern welfare state attempts to feed rich friends to the tigers in an effort to make the rest of us feel safe. It is doomed to failure.

Re: Politics of Envy

Don't confuse the progressive fascists with facts. Especially when they are in the middle of a good 2 minute hate.

Re: The welfare state and the lack of influence of the ordinary person

The welfare state is really important and needs to be kept, however keeping in mind the way public pensions work (current pensioners getting money paid in by current workers) and demographic shifts (more pensioners per worker) is not sustainable in it's current state.

The problem is that no matter how critical you think the welfare state is, it simply has no long term sustainability. You've identified the pension issue. You mention briefly but largely ignore the demographic issues. And you skipped key rational behaviors of the welfare state.

Pensions: while I personally would prefer to have all of my retirement money invested in publicly traded companies (shares and bonds), even that hides the reality that current pensioners are always paid from current workers. That is fine as long as there are 20, 10, or even 5 current workers per pensioner. Which brings us to the demographic shift.

I haven't independently confirmed that the UK has a baby boom issue similar to the US, but I imagine you do. Right now the number of people on pension is growing to the point that you have at best 2 people per pensioner and are rapidly shifting to 1 employed per 2 pensioners. There is no level of productivity that makes that work.

Finally, you have the rational reaction to the welfare state. This was actually the key bit of the Laffer curve and which progressives are always in denial. If you have welfare benefits* to the tune of say $25,000/year, and someone offers you a job at $26,000/year, is it worth it to take the job? The rational answer is probably not. In particular, if at $26,000/year you lose the welfare benefits, your marginal increase is $1000. For which you are going to have to work 2000 hours. That works out to 50 cents and hour marginal gain. So from a purely self-centered view, you're better off keeping the free time than taking the job. It's a perverse incentive and it is only one of them. Even if you fix the pension and demographic problems, this part will eventually overwhelm any welfare state.

*Using US numbers since there the ones with which I'm most familiar. While the specific values will change for the UK and various EU countries, the principle remains the same.

Re: It's actually quite simple...

Yes, many humans (if they're not really listening) will actually spend hours using this algorithm.

Uh-huh. And?

Re: Language skills?

I don't think it should be held against the Turing Test that there are people who can't pass it. I leave the question of what should be done with those who fail to others as a homework assignment.

Re: Language skills?

I think you can easily improve this one to more effectively imitate the baby.

10 Nu=Rnd(0)

20 If Nu >= .5 then 10

30 print "Waah! Waah! Waaaa!"

40 Goto 10

Re: Maybe there is a valid reason

I tend to agree with the AC to whom I replied that it is more likely a case of dropping the ball than malicious intent. The issue of course is they keep telling us they've made security the number one priority, and this undercuts that marketing.

Re: truth will undoubtedly be way more mundane

The truth is, if Security is Job 1 this comparison software is an obvious hacking tool. Therefore you have a protocol in place to make sure that exactly that sort of thing can't happen. Because everybody knows all those mundane things will torpedo anything less than that protocol being in place and backed by the CEO.

Re: "The core of Windows XP was developed before the Internet."

The development of NT was begun before Windows 95

While hyper-technically correct, your shifting grounds shows the faultiness of your original statement.

Generally when one speaks of the "core of XP" that means Windows 2000, which yes, was built on the NT kernel begun way way back with Windows NT 3.5. But the shifts from 3.5 to 4, to 2000 are so significant that when you speak of the kernel you actually call it out. By NT4.0 MS had already realized the internet was not going to be the fading fad Bill Gates confidently predicted it would be. That's pretty much what the whole IE monopoly case was all about, and that centers around Windows 95B-D/98. Gates shit a brick when he realized what a colossal mistake he'd made and reached for his monopoly power to fix it. With the help of a daft judged and an incompetent prosecution he managed to slip through.

Re: Easy Target

The law is clearly written and easy to follow (amazingly so, am I still on planet Earth?). The advice in the supplied brochure even more so (DO NOT pre-check the opt in box). This is easy compliance. John Lewis didn't do so.

Were they an easy target? Yes, but only because they chose to be one.

Re: On that note

I can see an argument for the taxi and not the mail. For the mail, they have an established route that goes by the delivery location every day anyway. A change in the route resulting from road work doesn't change that the mail still has and constant delivery schedule. Taxis are definitely ad hoc, heading only to your destination at the specific time you hire them and only for that trip. So charging for the detour seems fair, so long as the detour is actually for road work and is the shortest/quickest (depending on your which minimum you are seeking given known congestion) route to the destination. The problem is too many people don't feel taxis deliver that service.