john_b

An academic-style sabbatical would not work in the current software development ecosystem because, unlike tenured professors, top software developers cannot be trusted to stay with the same organization after the sabbatical. Universities can get away with this because a tenured professor has already contributed a lot of value to the university (a requirement for getting tenure) and can be trusted to return.

I don't see how this could be adapted short of formally contracting software developers for a period of multiple years and forcing the developer to pay a large amount of money should they break the contract early. I don't imagine many top developers would like the restrictions this imposed.

To answer your first question: yes. However, the amount varies greatly by state and changes year to year. Many of the programs for which states receive federal money are temporary in nature. Others, like federal subsidies for state Medicaid programs, are more permanent in nature. The actual ratio is going to be very uneven throughout the country.

I believe it is the former, as one of the core ideas of 1984 (arguably the core idea) is that when a tyrannical power has control over language, they have control over history, and when they have control over history they have control over the present and future.

You are probably right about the marketability of "slow" as a movement, but in hacker circles these ideas need to be discussed honestly and directly.

The analogy with house building is flawed. Home construction generally follows a preplanned architecture, schedule, and process that has been refined and tested over a long time in an environment which doesn't change much over time. The process of building houses is well understood and if a delay occurs it can be attributed to a lack of skills as you say (or funding problems, etc).

Software has a different nature. If you have thoroughly solved a problem, the solution can often be automated. There is no button you can press to build the same house you built once before. It still takes time, money, and materials. With software, if you are not spending a large portion of your time working on a problem that has a novel component or two, you or someone else has probably failed to automate enough.

As a result, you never quite possess the necessary skill set to solve your current task. You are always pushing some boundary, even if small. Gross skill set mismatch is a separate problem, of course, but a transient skill mismatch is an inherent aspect of good software development and I don't think it's justified to place any blame on moderate and transient skill mismatches as a result.

Whenever you are dealing with something novel, you will need to go slower than usual. It's the same for new types of buildings that use newer construction tools or technology.

Fundamentally life is just patterns of information and their associated support structures capable of reproducing and adapting to their environment. There really is no answer to the question of "why" life reproduces because life that does not reproduce ceases to be life. The reproduction component is inherent in its definition.

As to why our universe is one which supports life, nobody really knows. Some invoke the anthropic principle, but that is more of a philosophical answer than a scientific one.

> "you would rather limit damage and trust peoples' responsibility"

True, but most American cultural pathologies are rooted in mistrust of others, a mistrust which is itself often rooted in one or more fears that derive from ignorance. When you are ignorant and fearful of a problem or a group of people, it's much easier to appeal to your government to do something about it rather than actually try to understand that problem or people. Trusting those people to be responsible is the last thing that occurs to you in such a state of mind.

All I'm trying to say is that this is a specific instance of a much larger trend which has been in place for a long time. I don't know how to fix it.

Nothing in the OP's argument was quantitative. Both are qualitative arguments.

The OP raises some good points that deserve serious thought, but I find his argument sketchy and hand-wavy. The crux of the argument is this:

> "Our mainstream economic system is oriented towards maximal production and growth. This effectively means that participants are forced to maximize their portions of the cake in order to stay in the game. It is therefore necessary to insert useless and even harmful "tumor material" in one's own economical portion in order to avoid losing one's position. This produces an ever-growing global parasite fungus that manifests as things like black boxes, planned obsolescence and artificial creation of needs."

Everything else in the post is either analogy or following the assumptions in that paragraph to their conclusions. But the sheer amount of reasonable objections that are ignored or dismissed in that paragraph is staggering.

If today's capitalist systems have systemic issues that result in gross misuse of resources, I don't think it's for any of the reasons that the OP suggested. For that reason, I am skeptical of his proposed solutions.

Yes. We already have laws that protect a person's likeness by default. All that is necessary is to extend the concept to protecting personal information (of which a likeness is one example) by default. It probably won't happen until large numbers of Americans start valuing their personal information, however.

> "Cantor Fitzgerald did have extensive contingency plans in place, including a requirement that all employees tell their work passwords to four nearby colleagues."

This baffles my mind. Is this common practice in finance? What would stop a malicious actor from impersonating someone whose password they knew? Even if these passwords aren't tied to someone's identity in any way, they presumably exist to secure sensitive data and/or systems, but then they're shared with officemates like Dilbert comics?

A very interesting equilibrium too. As law enforcement increases the risk premium of running a drug market, rational markets need to compensate for that increased risk by diversifying into more lucrative activities, which in this case means adding more "evil" goods to the market.

The interesting part is that it further enables LEOs to further justify a drug war that is increasingly seen as unjustified by tying it to other law enforcement activities.

Space exploration is not for you. Your tax share of this mission, depending on where you live, is either zero or nearly zero. Asking for personal benefits from a space probe is silly.

However, your children, and their children, and so on will likely see benefits from it. The future is impossible to predict, however, so nobody can say what they will be. The principal benefit of missions like this is the new knowledge they generate. That knowledge is then the intellectual heritage of humanity for eternity, and can be used for any number of inventions, benefits, and future discoveries.

You are thinking too small. Even if somehow nothing ever comes of this mission, this is the sort of thing that humanity does not because it has survival value, but because it gives value to survival.

To pick one example, before the landing it was discovered that the gas jets emitted by the comet interact with the solar wind to produce a unique signal: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2014/11/12/4126840.ht...

The detailed dynamics are yet to be determined, but since the comet has an orbit that takes it from as close to the sun as Earth and as far away as Jupiter, this signal should change as it travels. Or maybe it doesn't, and if so, that would be a mystery worth investigating. This is a completely unexpected discovery that enables us to study a comet's magnetic field, and how it interacts with the solar wind.

Here are some possible benefits just from this one discovery:

1) The instruments necessary to even detect this signal are very impressive by themselves, developing them has probably improved a number of instrumentation technologies on Earth already.

2) The lander's instruments cannot penetrate the surface very far. The fact that this comet even has a magnetic field (however weak) is interesting. It could mean that a significant portion of the comet's interior is composed of iron, nickel, cobalt, or rare earth metals, which would be useful knowledge for people like these: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/asteroid-mining-venture-backed-b...

3) If future missions to comets find a different type of signal, which in turn leads to a different type of internal composition, the differences in a comet's magnetic field could be used to infer the composition of its interior from a distance, without sending any probes to the surface at all.

It's interesting that you believe that missions like this must be justified by short term benefits. These missions are very fortunately not about short term benefits.

One of the initial motivations for this mission was to learn more about our solar system's origins by studying a comet up close. Many engineering challenges were also overcome in the process, which will lead to positive side effects for future space missions and related areas, but one of the primary scientific questions this mission attempts to answer is "why is our solar system the way it is?" Answers to that question will likely help us better understand our place in the universe, and possibly shine a light on other solar systems as well. Maybe even give us a better idea how likely we are to encounter life in other solar systems, and what that life might be composed of.

Ironically, compared to questions of cosmic significance like these, short term concerns like treating present diseases or improving the current economic environment are petty and irrelevant by comparison. These are issues that science and government can tackle on earth, and issues where throwing more money at the problem doesn't always help. It is a fallacy to think that because space travel requires money, that earthly needs will go unfulfilled. It's deeply short sighted, in fact.

Your comment seems to be rooted in a deep misunderstanding of the nature of science. Science does not proceed by first devising a list of improvements to human wellbeing that will result from an experiment (though the grant application process in universities sometimes encompasses this task--with a lot of handwaving as a result). Science is about expanding our sphere of knowledge. By definition, we don't know what will result, or if it will have a positive impact. But we are trying something that has never been tried before, which is deeply interesting, and which has the potential to greatly expand our knowledge of the universe. Science is fundamentally a research activity: you can't know in advance what you will find. Asking what we will find before performing the experiment is pointless. The "might find" category for a mission like this is enormous, however.

Anything even remotely new is usually not a candidate for these types of long duration missions. Part of it is institutional inertia, but also partly a desire to use a technology stack that will still be in use decades from now. Even for missions that only take a few years, some of the same people will work on those missions as well as decade plus missions, so you have to hire people who are experts in mature technologies. Institutions like NASA and ESA want to work with a technology stack that will remain stable and which they know will be maintainable by people in the future.

C and languages that compile to C (Fortran is used as well) are often employed since you have powerful control over memory usage.

Source: I work in the aviation industry, where the technologies are different but the lifecycle concerns are very similar.

The same arguments presented by the article could be applied equally to the fate of farmers after the mechanization of farming. A mechanically inclined boy in a rural area is now more likely to grow up and become a tractor mechanic than a farmer.

There is an interesting story underneath this article about how technology displaces people and changes how society sees them (and how they see themselves). But that story isn't told. Instead a bunch of navel gazing about Silicon Valley gender inequities steals the focus.

> "Kids are inconvenient and expensive and people mistakenly feel they'll have a happier life without them, but in a certain sense it's an empty life."

s/kids/startups/ to see how ridiculous this sounds. Any kind of presumption that other people should make certain major life decisions a certain way just because you feel that will make them happy sounds extremely presumptuous.

This same logic has been used throughout history by tyrants of all stripes, often when the election results were decided in advance.

You DO have the right to bitch about things, whether you vote or not. You have a constitutionally protected freedom of speech and not voting does not expunge that right.

You are presuming, quite arrogantly as I see it, that someone who doesn't vote has found or can find a candidate they are willing to support. Many people who don't vote find themselves unwilling to support either of the two talking parrots they are given to choose between and conclude the whole exercise if fruitless.

If you live in a state with very close elections it might be worth your time to select the lesser of two evils, or even a good and honest candidate should you have one available somehow. But we have a winner take all system and there are many people in this country who are effectively disenfranchised because they live in gerrymandered districts or districts with a large bias toward one party. Telling those people that they have no right to voice their discontent about the state of their government precisely because they recognize their own powerlessness to change it is extremely disrespectful and ignorant.

No, for several reasons.

The congressional election in my district is essentially a foregone conclusion and since our voting system is winner-take-all there is really no point in voting for the opposition. I also happen to think both candidates are unqualified to represent themselves, much less a state.

My state has judicial elections as well, which might be worth voting in if any of the candidates were less despicable. Some of their ads are Onion-worthy. All judicial candidates I've seen have breathlessly tried to one-up their opponents by being "tougher on crime" while glossing over thier utter disregard for the either the federal or state Constitutions. It's made me wonder if defense attorneys can even pursue a judicial career in a place like this.

Some have made the argument that not voting is also equivalent to a vote of no confidence in the available candidates and/or system as a whole. I kind of agree with this, but doubt that such a protest is really effective.

One of the few things our highly divided political factions do agree on is that everyone should vote. Preferably for their party, but at least vote for someone. Depending on your perspective, this is either evidence that voting is such an obviously good thing which everyone should do regardless of their circumstances, or (if you are less trusting of their stated motivations) an attempt to ensure their own legitimacy. In a way, each vote that isn't cast is a vote against all the candidates, so the idea that someone would not vote is equally offensive to our political factions regardless of what side of the aisle they sit on. Since I happen to think that many of these individuals do not deserve their present positions, and the candidates their respective caucases and donors have promoted to replace them are no better, not voting is the most natural expression of my opinion "you are all unqualified."

Basically, the marginal value of spending my time not voting (e.g. working, reading, even writing about why I don't see a point in voting in this election) far exceeds the expected return on that same time should I spend it voting. I suspect it's the same for many people. Most arguments to the contrary appeal to various theoretical notions or idealistic purposes/side effects of voting, which to me just sounds like "you should vote because it will make you feel good." If it makes you feel good, then go ahead. Some people like to feel like they're participating. I prefer to know that I'm impacting the decisions that get made in my state in a positive way, and I don't consider selecting the lesser of two evils to meet that requirement.

Being in the top 15th percentile of income might not be as much of a consolation if you live in the second most expensive metro area in the U.S.

There is nothing in your comment to support your claims. You claim an exception to a rule but provide no argument to support this exception. And then say that the largest revenue producing tax in the U.S. has the least impact on the populace.

> "The reason to have income tax is to have people who can afford it contribute to society. I can see how that is a good thing."

This argument justifies all taxes that a person can afford, which makes the reasoning here obviously wrong. The exact same reasoning applies to an internet tax, a premium toilet paper tax, or a smart phone tax.

Taxes are not justified solely because people can afford them or because those taxes contribute to society. Taxes are justified on an economic basis and on that basis alone. When pooling money under government control according to some distribution scheme results in greater economic output (accounting for all externalities) than would be produced by the same money used for solely private purposes, then and only then is such a tax justified.

The near impossiblility of assessing the relative utility of each approach is why individual taxes are largely a political debate rather than an economic one.

Even assuming that the lack of processing power on the TV is a correct theory, your comment misses the point here.

The issue is not about the intent of the manufacturer. Noble intent or not, the story is about what is enabled by this device. Any time you rely on noble intent of a 3rd party you are putting a lot of trust in them. Especially when those third parties can monetize your data without you ever knowing about it.

Technology provides the tools for mass surveilance and globally undermining trust, but it also provides tools for removing the need for trust, and apparently this smart TV adopts a "just trust us" approach.

The (unstated) objection that can be inferred from the article is that because the US has no firm protections here, it pushes the burden and costs of these programs onto employers, who are incentivized to minimize spending on these programs (and thus the benefits).

It's a democratic republic, to be specific. Republicanism is the form of the government (representation of the people), democratic elections are the mechanism of selecting those representatives. You could have, e.g. a technocratic, plutocratic, or a constitutional monarchial republic.

Can you cite anything to support this? I find it hard to believe that a court would completely ignore the basis on which consent was given. For example:

"The Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution require that a consent to a search not be coerced, by explicit or implicit means, by implied threat or covert force. For, no matter how subtly the coercion was applied, the resulting "consent" would be no more than a pretext for the unjustified police intrusion against which the Fourth Amendment is directed" [1]

...which seems to indicate that the same notion of "fruit of the poisonous" tree as regards evidence applies equally to consent to search.

[1] Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218 (U.S. 1973)

It's only win-win if no heads roll, as the parent proposed.

If you are like me and just want to see the raw data in a user-friendly and customizable way without a bunch of pointless graphics or text descriptions, there is also http://weatherspark.com/

It's a nitpick, but consistency and fairness are independent qualities in legal interpretations. As the simplest example, consistently applying an unfair ruling or precedent does not result in fairness. Only by presuming that all previous court rulings (at least those that can be used as precedents) were fair, does consistency result in fairness.

"Public interest" in this context is not the same thing as "the interest of the public". The former is a fairly objective (though difficult to measure) thing which concerns itself with the welfare of the populace [1]. This is historically what was meant by "public interest," though the newer meaning of "whatever interests the public" has muddied the meaning of the phrase somewhat.

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/public+interest

> "You can say what you want about too much debt, overpriced real estate, manufacturing, etc..., but they'll figure that out."

If this logic were applied to an investment decision it would be considered foolish regardless of the eventual result. You don't go looking for facts to support your economic thesis; those are easy to find. You look for the objections to that thesis and think very critically about them, trying to figure out how (not just if) the strengths of the country or company can compensate for those weaknesses. Blithely dismissing some of the most significant objections to your thesis is the most damning signal of not having thought it through.