PorterDuff

Again, there's a Soviet counterexample of army/party/intelligence service.

Even in the case of a dictatorial and lifetime head of state, separation of powers is baked into the cake by groups with common interests, sometimes organically, sometimes on purpose.

The counter example is the way the Soviets dealt with chemicals, oil, power.

Personally, I think that the government vs. industry split becomes rather academic when you are speaking of monopolies, especially monopolies that spy on you. I expect that there's a slow motion merger into a GoogleFacebookMicrosoftApple.gov body with the companies acting as cabinet branches.

I'll bet that most people would get by fine with an open source version of a Chromebook.

To tell you the truth, I think that Trump would have done well in any political era, particularly those where unflagging public speaking was necessary to get the gig.

Good political instincts, ability to speak extemporaneously (a rare ability in the modern era). I expect that he could have picked up a House seat fairly easily on the way to a Presidential campaign as sort of a Williams Jennings Bryanesque character.

I do agree though that the internet has changed the character of politics (painfully obvious). Anything that breaks the back of newspapers and broadcasters as gatekeepers isn't such a bad thing, the trick is to avoid having youtube/facebook/etc. become activist successors to the NYT and CBS.

In terms of celebrities/politicians, it's worth glancing through late 19th C. newspapers. They make the modern version look positively unbiased and polite.

" they set their prices by taking the Medicare reimbursement rate, and multiplying by 8."

lol. Seriously? Well it's a simple system.

I wonder what happens when it's Medicare-for-all. Do they make 1/8 as much all of a sudden?

Say, that's an interesting idea.

Develop a good-quality fake identity purely for skipping on medical bills.

Just to add an alternative that I've considered (now being a kind of programmer emeritus) is to go into a full-tilt asset hiding mode. There's just too many ways to lose your hoard of cash.

It's hard to beat the Pixelon launch party.

Someone should really make a movie on that one.

I think you've got your head on straight, although it's probably best to think of the old-programmer problem as a kind of half life. Every year, some percentage of the remaining ones drop out, often through no fault of their own.

The main thing is to panic now instead of panic later. Ease into a Plan B before it's a dire necessity.

I wonder to what extent insurance issues have driven the death of shop classes. I have no current knowledge, but it wouldn't surprise me if modern day chemistry class has veered away from actually touching dangerous items.

My experimental concept for post-secondary schooling goes as follows:

Spend four years at junior college(s) taking useful sounding classes. German, welding, programming, calculus, jazz band, EMT, with no intention of getting an associates degree (which is of little value in any case).

Cheap, and you might actually learn something. In the modern era, I'm not so sure that following the obvious path is the right idea anymore.

Welding sounds pretty good after a career doing software.

I mostly like the idea of it as a means to an end. Not so much a way to make money working on trailer hitches but as a necessary skill for a race car fabricator or artist.

Truth is, we should probably all start over every decade or so. It's impractical, but you'd go to your grave with a more interesting resume.

I should be more clear. When I say 'management', I'm really referring to 2nd level managers and up. From my experience, line managers are either the member of the technical staff who tells the lords and masters that everything is fine (and are mostly fighting fires or pushing a chunk of hardware through a pipeline) or they have three ring binders full of yearly company-supplied HR stuff. In neither case is there enough power to really 'run' things. Heaven help you if there's a completely separate creature known as the 'project manager'.

OTOH, directors/VPs (and other intermediate levels in larger firms) are not only the people that senior technical staff will run to for various reasons, but also are the folks who love to hear 'no problem' and that 'everything is fine'. Bringing them things to worry about is best done cautiously. In the final analysis, the worker bees are ERUs.

YMMV (very much so) of course. I can speak only for about a dozen companies. The world is a big place.

"The American culture is very antagonistic. In democratic societies, which are less antagonistic, this would become a matter of new public consensus much sooner before they would go on actual strike"

Like France?

I was busy doing God's Work (upvoting any downvoted posts) and was considering the article.

So far as I can tell, the point of the article is that this is another salvo in the war between California and the federal government in terms of who gets to run immigration law, not some sort of newfound distaste for private prisons.

Curious that all the posts are about private vs. public prisons. I did poke around a bit and the private prisons don't appear to be cheaper, and it's rather surprising that they even exist given the amount of power public unions have.

Perhaps someone in the biz could pipe up, just what is the point of a private prison? All that occurs to me is the opportunity to ramp up a facility quickly or perhaps just the need for a law enforcement organization to park people when they don't want to be in that business. Dunno.

Now that I think of it, I wonder why the larger employers in the South Bay don't build dormitories. Given a strong tendency to hire people fresh out of school (or nearly so), I would think that a great big dormitory on the company campus might be just the thing. It removes housing as an issue for a new hire, ties them more closely to the company (quit, you have to find an apartment), and they can spend their evenings shooting Nerf darts and shopping at the GoogleGrocery and the GoogleCoffeeShop.

I'm afraid I wouldn't believe you.

With rare exceptions, management wants to hear 'no problem' and that 'everything is fine'.

The next thing to do is a PowerPoint chart for the 2nd level managers showing names and stress levels over time with trends.

Just imagine the hilarity when a society made up of 20 billion people living efficient, highrise-dwelling, car-pooling, vegetarian, recycling kind of lives breaks down.

Heck, cut right to the chase and ask how occasional high peak summer temperatures kill people and what to do about it. An old lady keeling over in an apartment isn't helped a bit by internet climate change wars.

Given the super low price of smaller window A/C units, you'd think they'd install a few more of those, maybe it's impractical for some reason. Looking at a chart showing summer highs in Paris since 1900, it would be interesting to look at a newspaper from 1948 and see what happened (the chart shows a roughly 1 C upwards change since 1900 on average, but the last couple of years are outliers similar to a few earlier heatwaves).

I've always wondered what would happen if the power went off for a day or two in Phoenix in August.

Do they require fire suppression systems and solar panels in the rest of the US? I honestly don't know.

I'll bet it's better the second time you order after it recognizes you hearing your voice, reading your license plate, peering at your phone or face.

WOULD YOU LIKE THE REGULAR, MR TRACKER1? DIET DR. PEPPER IS ON SALE THIS WEEK.

I'm also assuming that if the AI is having trouble, they just shoot the tasty food ordering mic over to a call center in the Philippines.

Is it? As I remember, real prices only started climbing sometime after 2000.

"In software engineering sometimes conclude that a rewrite is necessary. How can we completely rewrite our regulations?"

A currency collapse or a successful invasion perhaps.

Even 'freezing a moment of time' is kind of a suspicious thing. People don't understand the present time and they sure as heck don't understand previous ones.

While fixing the plane while it's in flight is hard, I'm trusting our upcoming robot overlords to understand tax or criminal law. Accreting everyone's good ideas for a century or two was bound to result in a hairball.

Perhaps it's similar to the economics of retail gasoline prices at gas stations.

It's worth considering California building code in the cost of new construction.

Hah, thanks for the insight.

I was simply thinking, Unintended Consequences in 5,4,3,2,1...but that's one I hadn't thought of. Of course people will push up against the limit in order to buffer out market values.

You could easily see rents above where they should be from a market standpoint simply because of the inertia in a system of annual increases.

It also makes me wonder if you are allowed to increase rents if you improve a dwelling. If not, nothing gets fixed beyond the bare minimum.

As I remember the book, they back tested quite a lot. It's just that whenever they went live with trading reality changed on 'em. Go figure.

Heck, I managed that without interstellar travel.

That sounds too much like this:

https://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term-Manageme...

As I remember, beaucoup back testing, hilarity ensues anyway.

I've always wanted to design a slot machine that traded a few NASDAQ stocks.

You go into a bar, run your credit card and stick some money in the machine, buy/sell some shares (with leverage?), machine owner skims off fees, cash out when done.

I never thought day trading worked very well and given the number of non-human brains on the other side (plus the overhead), the odds are good that the odds are bad.