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grr. i can't keep up with so much stuff in each message. so i'm not gonna try:
"Standards can emerge quite handily in a competitive market place; it happens all the time without government intervention."
indeed they can. IP (internet protocol) developed over decades.
your screw example is false: i still can't use a whole lotta software for linux on windows or for windows on my mac. AOL was the model because everyone want to set up the "tollgate" for use of the internet. MSFT had something called blackbird or bluebird, which was gonna be their AOL clone. what motivation would any of them have had for providing complete interoperability.
IP is exactly about making things that are incompatible work together.
"The "extra stuff" is market-speak."
no the extra stuff is not market speak, it is additional pipelines for doing serious number crunching and special purpose 3d hypertorus network with broadcast along rows.
"it would make absolutely no sense to make a few thousand high performance chips on their own unique design; some minor varients"
you are thinking small. look at the specs of computers like ASCI Blue Pacific, ASCI White, BG/L (Blue Gene/L), Roadrunner. and look at the price tag.
"So your solution is to copy the Chinese and soviet-style government sponsored research labs. Brilliant idea . . . Not!"
no, the system we have in place right now works pretty well.
"Weapon systems do not require "supercomputing"; after all, it is not real time simulation."
no, they are massive simulations of plasmas and subatomic particles that are run with timesteps on the order of femtoseconds and track phenomena that evolve over milliseconds or more. on supercomputers they can run for days or weeks and produce data measured in petabytes.
"Oh, ya, your beloved government prevention of run-on-the-bank played a big part too in inducing market participants into all sorts of risky deals."
none of these was the cause exactly. it was greensperm's stubborn faith in the self-regulation of the markets. when he stacked the deck, he forgot about moral hazard. what he didn't realize is that they game he set up had a very obvious flaw: the best way to beat the system was to cheat so extensively that your failure would mean failure of the whole system. that way, if you lose, you're guaranteed a government rescue.
"The reason was import tax favored by the North, and rejected by the South. Taxation is quite impossible without gunpoint; without gunpoint, it's call voluntary contribution."
all ancient history. "taxation without representation" if you recall. if you oppose taxation, elect suitable representatives. you have representation. again, that's how we govern ourselves. again, if you don't like it, you can always get some cheap beachfront property in costa rica.
"So which national lab invented the i4004? Arguably the most important invention in the second half of 20th century."
of course intel invented the i4004, but intel did not invent the first processor, just the first single-chip processor.
as i said before, i'm talking research, you're talking engineering. research preceeds engineering. intel did not invent the technology to put digital cirtuits on silicon. they put some brain cells into scrunching an entire (small) processor on a single chip. i.e. they got there first, but everyone was on the same path. it was only a question of whether the technology was mature enough at the time. not to try to take away anything from their achievement, of course. but that's what the free market does well. science, it does not.
throw robotics at the free market and u get roomba. throw robotics at the army and you get hoards of wireless reconaissance drones.
"Why do you think none of those inventions that transformed the people's living standards came out the Soviet Union or China or India? They certainly did not lack government sponsored research. They graduated several times as many scientists and engineers as the US did."
no, the soviet union and china did not have government-funded PEER-REVIEWED research. they had government projects. there is a serious difference.
american universities are superior, of course. its known world-wide. why? because researchers at universities are doing cutting edge research. why? because they are funded through peer reviewed grants, which in turn they use to fund their own research and train their graduate students. and in turn they turn over technology to industry (cisco) or produce graduate students who exploit what they've learned (google) or spin off their own companies (akamai).
"Alan Turing was part of all the sharp brains that the government rounded up during WWII. The private sector simply had all the brilliant minds taken from it, and vast resources confiscated from it in order to fund the effort of killing fellow human beings in another country. By your logic, if not for governmen draft, there wouldn't be able-bodied men . . . after all the rejects in the civilian life during the war were not as fit as the drafted soldiers."
well that was england. and i'm sure, with v2's raining down on them, most folks appreciated the urgency. although clearly turing did not appreciate the army's efforts to cure his homosexuality.
ah, but some things never change.
my bottom line: free market is cool but it can use guidance, especially when the issue is basic research. that is the role of government or philosopher-kings or whoever we can find to take responsibility for such enormous decisions. with luck, they'll be smart people with good advisors. hockey moms need not apply.
wow, you sound like a von mises tinfoil hat guy.
the cost of prescription drugs has little to do with insuring the uninsurable and everything to do with lack of free market pricing in prescription drugs (prices are set by insurance). and its largely u.s. specific, since we subsidize the research budgets of big pharma through our overpayment. that's a bubble worth popping. the same goes for medical care: here, obama is right: costs can be constrained by strongly encouraging preventative care and by getting the uninsured out of emergency rooms for routine care.
"Goes to show that Hollywood is terrible place to learn economics, finance, history and public policy."
well i learned it at yale and mit. i was appealing to the vulgar medium in case that was your only exposure to nash and his legacy.
the enron example is correct but misplaced: with fractional reserve lending, there can be a run on any bank and it will make it come tumbling down. that's the nature of the beast. you may disagree with the implemenation of that policy, but nevertheless it is a fact: your money just ain't there.
which is what galls me about all these fox newsies (huckabee is a great one for this) who always talk about letting the banks fail, they lost their money, yadda yadda. no, they lost *our* money.
"All that guarantee is of course not free . . . instead, it's a transfer of weath from the prudent to the imprudent, well the public at large to the well-connected."
yeah, its a bad thing, people should go to jail, its not fair, etc. i agree. so you want to be the only guy with a stash of treasury bills while the rest of the country wallows in 25% unemployment, economic stagnation, widows and orphans eating catfood in the gutter? is that really an option? i think not. it might be best for you, the prudent, but its likely not best for everyone.
but then, who said life was fair?
The internet expanded very slowly while managed by the government under APARNET, then grew extremely rapidly when freed of government management; the existing physical telephone network in the 90's helped too.
pace gore.
the key word here is grow. not initiate, grow. i don't dispute that free market forces are great to exploit results from basic research. but we would not have what we have now if not for government involvement. its easy to see what we would have had: an outgrowth of AOL and Compuserve, big old private networks with mutually inconsistent standards, etc.
IBM's blue-whatever and Cray's "super computers" have been using arrays of garden variety commercial microprocessors for a decade and half now.
no, they have not. blue gene, for example, uses powerPC's with extra stuff. kinda like the Cell, but predates the cell. think of leveraging some bits of commodity CPUs and then adding extra hardware for doing things like fast networking. Tera is much more unique.
It's not entirely clear the government involvement is beneficial to the industry or to the society
its not? i think you're forgetting that an enormous fraction of this supercomputing capability is used in research and design of weapons systems. those applications don't hit the front page, of course, since all the work is classified. but there you have it. sure, you could do data mining on some big old cluster. but that's just a piece of it.
"Science did not exist before the late 19th century. People didn't even know how to dream, think, or light fire before the big government came along to help them. Private benefectors next existed."
private patronage is better than government-sponsored, peer-reviewed research? i think you're getting carried away by your principles and not recognizing that there are better ways to allocate resources than those that come from free market competition. if we returned to a patronage system, our universities would crumble, faculty would scatter to industry and the chinese would eat our lunch. and of that i am 100% certain.
are your principles so overwhelming that you'd be willing to see us enter a new dark age just to achieve them? look at the hole greenspan dug for himself by his belief in self-regulating free markets.
So taking money from citizens at gun point to research for a disease that primarily affect somewhere else is laudable now? Wow, I'm really impressed by the Sage King.
not at gunpoint. by consent. social contract, representative government. if you'd prefer something else, why do you remain in the u.s.? this is how we have agreed to govern ourselves.
So which national lab came up with i4004, the very first silicon microprocessor?
no, that was the first integrated (1-chip) microprocessor, not the first microprocessor using silicon technology.
Which national lab came up with cisco routers?
cisco came out of government sponsored research at stanford. 3com came out of research at xerox parc.
Which national lab came up with Motronics and dynamic stability control that cleared up the air and save lives from spin-outs?
i don't know this area. don't try to tell me that there is no basic research in control theory, because i know better.
Which national lab came up with RoundUp? Which national lab came up with ATM machine the credit card (on which our economy has been floating for two decades now, LOL).
i have no idea what roundup is. the atm machine has nothing to do with science.
who is responsible for accurate weather prediction? for precision bombing? for almost all the advances in robotics, now used on assembly lines? who is responsible for funding CDMA research? (what CDMA brings to the table is much more than what you suggested in a previous post. it has to do with how much data can be stuffed into transmissions.) GPS? (try triangulating your position from cell-phone towers when you're out in rural america.) satellite technology of all sorts? magnetic resonance imaging?
you can't get around the basic fact that few companies do basic research. again, the only exceptions are the now defunct bell labs and the long defunct xerox parc. everything from the computer revolution comes from there, or from academia. (and your previous example of unix from bell labs has an extra twist: unix would never have taken off if bell labs hadn't handed the sources over to berkeley, which in turn distributed it to the world. which in turn has become BSD unix. which in turn has contributed the entire network stack to Windows and the entire operating system to Apple. (cuz that's what's sitting under Mac OS X.)
it shouldn't be hard to grasp the concept that Alan Turing had his idea even before the government hired him or would have come up with it anyway in private employment, and he probably would have come up with even greater ideas if not for his life being ruined by the government.
really? who was going to pay alan turing to study stored program computers? who, at that time, had enough money and vision to dump it all into such an outlandish project?
your point is easily proved false: the fact that alan turing DID come up with his ideas with government funding BEFORE anyone in the private sector beat him to it says clearly that government funding can be more efficient at achieving high-risk high-payoff goals.
that october 24th video is excellent. so is it "the last big bubble"?
What follows shortly afterwards is usually financial bankruptcy, moral decay and the fall of civilization.
there are not enough data points to evaluate that claim. certainly our own smaller instances of that - health insurance for the uninsurable or property insurance in florida for those who can't get it otherwise or no-fault or other auto insurance don't fit that bill.
the test of private charity is not to be based on what happens when everyone is happy and fat and can comforably choose between sending money to a starving child in africa and a starving cat in ensino. its when everyone is feeling pain and nobody wants to give a handout to those who need it, but possibly don't deserve it.
there are really good examples from game theory, which you might be familiar with, or if not even have seen in the movie aboug nash, "a beautiful mind". his discovery was that there are situations where everyone, acting in their own best interest, will drive a system to a worse, or at least less than optimal, solution. if a bank is wobbly, it makes sense to go and take your money out. but if everyone does this, you have a panic that causes a collapse. that collapse was completely unnecesaary. if you have some agent come in - and in this case, probably only the gov can do it - and guarantee your deposits, voila, panic averted. a very cheap solution that eliminates an otherwise very costly problem.
the free market is not always the most efficient solution. locally good strategies can have globally disasterous effects. look at the self-reinforcing nature of the housing bubble, as another example.
can government be trusted to have this role? dunno. i prefer to think that there are such people out there that can, for example, find a better solution to our current problems than "lets just let all the banks go under and deal with the consequences, even if it throws us into a new dark age, cuz those are the laws of nature." the laws of nature are that we get transcriptional errors in our DNA which eventually give us cancer and we die. we don't roll over and accept that in medicine and we shouldn't roll over and accept it when it comes to economics.
and now, for entertain purposes only, the obama-mccain dance-off:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/financial_crisis_humour/blog/2008/10/24/john_mccain_vs_barack_obama_danceoff
Your argument that the internet would not be born if not for government is a little like saying the computer industry would never have had the funds to evolve beyond the punch-card stage if not for the Nazis buying a ton of those machines to run their concentration camps.
not at all. its the argument that no single company has the resources and talent and capital to install a global shared resource, and that the government can, or at least speed up the process. look at the speed at which the internet has taken over communications versus the years and legal wrangling necessary for the evolution of telephone. telephone began as something distributed, the market realized that monopoly was required for true universal access, and then that monopoly was counterproductive to its further development.
The super-computing example you cited shows the folly of government sponsorship.
which folly was only exposed through government-sponsored research, much at the national labs. that's where the major supercomputers based on commodity clusters are. and that's where the world's largest true supercomputers - ibm's blue gene and computers from tera (formerly cray) are still essential. that doesn't mean that commodity clusters won't eventually win, but they're not a replacement for supercomputers everywhere. otherwise, the gov wouldn't be providing the lifeline to sgi and others to keep them producing the technology that's still needed.
Peer-review is not substitute for real market competition.
indeed. it can not be. because ideas with a payoff that is decades away can not compete in the free market. that's the point i've been trying to make over and over. the free market has its place, certainly. but pure research would not be funded by it.
How else do you explain more funding for aids than for cancer and heart disease combined?
aids is communicable and tractable. heart disease has great preventative treatment: lifestyle change. cancer is likely to be immensely intractable: there are so many different kinds of cancers with different causes. but here we come back to government sponsorship, cuz screening for various cancers and susceptibility comes directly from work on the human genome. and yes, private companies took up that work and improved on it significantly. but it happened only because the government launched the project and provided the initial funding, a sort of man-on-the-moon effort. and relatively cheap!
When each of the latter kills an order of magnitude more people every year than the former?
yes, and there is great motivation in the market to support reserach in those areas, because the payoff is obvious and large. aids largely affects poor countries in africa.
we know what causes cancer. transcription errors in copying DNA. it happens every day to everyone. you live long enough, and it will happen in the wrong spot in the wrong gene and poof, cancer. do we know how we will cure it? do we know where the answer will come from? scientific discovery rarely comes so directly. so much of it is serendipity. scientist X is studying clams and finds a genetic modification with this property and scientist Y reads that and sees how it explains something seen in gerbils and scientist Z recognizes that this pathway in gerbils resembles something in chimp pathway could be modified by the stem cell therapy that she has been studying. if scientist Y hadn't received continued funding for studying rats, the whole chain of events is broken. and without a steady source of funding, why would scientist Y spend his life studying gerbils? sexual gratification?
If you want public funding, you are guaranteed to have wrong priorities and waste. . . because the clowns spending someone else' money pilfered at gun point have to cater to the lowest denominator emotional issues. It's marketting not science.
so you are claiming that all univeristy research and all research from the national labs is wasted. and i contend, on the contrary, that virtually every advance in technology and medicine during the last century has had its start in exactly these places, with perhaps the sole exception being bell labs and xerox parc.
i think if you trace back each of these examples of market forces winning out in the end, you'll find that they all begin somewhere with an essential piece that was government funded.
BTW, building a rocket that can go to the moon if it doesn't blow up on launch or on the way is considerably less complicated than building an automated production line that turns out reliable hybrid cars profitably. The Russians, and soon the Chinese and Indians, can all do the former, but not the latter.
the issues are completely different. to quote some professor from berkeley, i think: "the first time you do something it’s science. the second time it’s engineering. a third time it’s just being a technician." i'm talking about the scientists. you're talking about the technicians.
Roe vs Wade is the law as interpreted by a liberal view
it is the law of the land as interpreted by the supreme court. thus it is the law of the land, no ifs, ands or butts. period. end of discussion. you, i and religious entities do not have the authority to interpret the law.
I still have never understood how liberals can justify allowing the mother to kill a VIABLE unborn fetus, a human being in development and you want to abolish the death penalty for those that murder, rape and commit serious crimes ...
oh, this is very simple to understand. a viable fetus can only be aborted for the sake of the mother's health. for example, if your wife is carrying a baby and it is found that she has cancer that requires immediate chemotherapy. should the government force her to carry the fetus to term or permit her to undergo the treatment she needs to save her own life. these are difficult cases, to be sure, but the "liberal" view - as well as the libertarian view, i might add - is that it is not the place of government to make this decision. it is between a woman and her doctor.
now if you think the argument against abortion is so obvious, then why are you not willing to make that argument to women in general, and give them the means to make the proper decision for themselves? why do you require the government to make that decision for them? if the argument is so obvious, why can't you make it directly to those who are making the decision? why do you require government to impose itself on health issues?
why, if you allow a woman to kill her unborn fetus, dont you allow her to kill them at anytime in LIFE???
because one or two or 16 or 32 cell embryos are naturally flushed and die all the time, and they have no characteristics that we think of as "human" - human features and brain activity and so forth. somewhere between being a clump of cells and a viable fetus things change, and someone has to draw a line. Roe did that, perhaps imperfectly. but the argument that the government has to protect everything down to that clump of cells is just a reductio ad absurdum.
if the argument is religious, well, why should the government impose a religious judgement on everyone in the land?
the difference is????????????????????????
the difference is that in early stages there is no brain or no brain activity, and dependence on the mother. we routinely allow those with no brain activity to die, like terry schiavo. after that, there is still the dependence of the fetus on the mother to survive, and if there is a choice between her life and the fetus's life, the government permits a decision to be made.
if you had a child and it was discovered that her heart was defective and she couldn't survive without an immediate transplant, would you give her yours? maybe you would (although you wouldn't find a doctor to do it). but would you support a law that mandated that you give her your heart? how is this any different than what so-called "partial birth" abortion laws that omit exceptions for the health of the mother intend to do?
"Could you give me my distribution of wealth in advance ..."
glad to see you have finally seen the light of enlightened self-interest, my man!
here's how you do it.
step 1. vote for obama.
step 2. wait 100 days.
step 3. check is in the mail.
see, you're not gonna get my money unless *i* get what i want out of this deal. which is an end to government support of the far-right social agenda. give me that, and you've got my money. its all or nothing, dood.
And that would be a misconception. Computers that talked to each other long pre-dated DARPA.
completely irrelevant. the modem is the merely the last step in puzzle. and yes, i know, my dad always talks about having modem access from his high school back in the 70s. but the internet is something so much more than that. its about how you take lots of heterogenous, unreliable networks all over the world and link them together, allow users from one to tunnel through 5 or 10 intermediate networks - maybe all using different network protocols, data representation, hardware from different vendors - to get to their destination. and how you do it reliably, when networks and links go down all the time. how you do it with adequate throughput. how you layer applications on top it. if it had been begun in the private sector, it would have been one grand socialist experiment, since it was all about me letting you use my network resources in any way that you want, with the understanding that i won't snoop or tamper with your data.
anyway, its not a myth. the private sector did produce competition to the internet. AOL is a prime example. a private network. the internet won out in the marketplace because of its global distributed nature, which also distributes costs and increases reliability. but the research needed to get there is something you're ignoring. consider even something as simple as DNS, the domain name service. out of all the computers out there, how do you find the one that wants to call itself investorshub.advfn.com?
A bunch of government employees reinvented the wheel, and their bureacratic overlords with too much time on their hands had to rewrite history in order to justify their own agencies' funding. That's where the typical public education history comes from.
yes, but not the government. the government supplies the funds and gathers the experts. the experts do peer review on proposals for research. it is a system that works, at least for NSF and NIH. DARPA and the national labs are substantially different, but they really do need to serve defense and national security. but there is still a fair degree of peer review involved.
there was actually a clandestine CIA project that siphoned every penny that the big-three got for hybrid research and dumped it all in Toyota's account; that's how hybrids got off the ground. Tongue firmly in cheek, of course.
hybrid research is not blue-sky research. its a question of how you make incremental changes to stuff you have to address present problems. look how little time it took american car manufacturers not only to duplicate but also to bring to market a competitive product. this is not what i'm talking about. i'm talking about things like nanotechnology, gene therapy, advanced robotics research. what company has the resources to investigate how you might build hoards of simple robots that can coordinate amongst themselves and gather information or perform simple tasks with dexterity? but defense has a motivation to explore this (battlefield reconnaisance) and so does energy (nuclear plant cleanup).
Most people would have completely missed emergin opportunites; that's what makes those opportunities so profitable for those who recognize them for what they are.
i think not, i think you would have been impressed. my dad talks of using a Xerox Alto and a Xerox Dorado in grad school, and says that the WISIWIG editor was completely smooth and usable, and that the performance never a problem.
The political process is a terrible way of discovering what's worth researching. The steam engine must have been discovered and rediscovered more than half a dozen times in human history before it finally powered industrial revolution as we knew it.
i agree. which is why peer review is the answer. politicians clearly screw this up. look at how easily mccain and palin dismiss earmarks for scientific projects to low-brow audiences. heck, palin was arguing for special needs children and she proposed to pay for it by cutting earmarks for genetic research into fruit flys. on the surface that may sound compelling but if you're a scientist you'd say its an instance of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
That's what makes it all the more tragic when capital resources are taxed away and destroyed on unprofitable pursuits motivated by politics and collective dumbness.
agreed entirely.
but there is something else that you have to consider. just like there is a public insurance system, and then there is a government catch all for those who are otherwise uninsurable. that makes sense because the public sector does what it does. the government provides the safety net. and they deploy the safety net using a similar paradigm, to better manage the risk.
the public sector doesn't invest heavily in high-risk/high-payoff ventures with a long time frame. without government support, the internet would probably not have happened. the human genome project. supercomputing vendors would all have disappeared. particle physics would be dead. half or more of our mathematicians would be gone, and there'd be as many pure mathematicians in the world as poets, all the rest doing applied math.
anyway, to say government has no role is false. to say that politicization of the process is bad is certainly true. and we've seen so much more of that over the last 8 years, as the budget of NSF has been cut and the direction that DARPA has taken has been significantly narrowed.
yes, but you see: you don't even need to read the book to understand it. i posted my first response to you without even knowing anything about the whole discussion on the web or about what the sentence or its context actually is. i had to google it to find out. but even that original sentence is completely defensible.
how did i do that? how did i realize that he must be talking about muslim americans and about japanese internment? because i know that he is a reasonable man and that he's running for president; i know what the constitution says; and i know that anyone running for president, sworn to uphold the constitution, can't say anything other than what he said. it is a job requirement of the executive.
now on the other hand, the only candidate that i've seen who has come close to sneering at the consitution came with mccain's air quotes about "health of the mother" regarding abortion. the job he's running for is president. he's the executive. its not his job to interpret the constitution, and Roe which is the law of the land. its not his job to legislate. its his job to execute.
"We are in real trouble .."
nudge nudge: we're already in real trouble, thanks to bush and dick and all the president's cronies.
Ken Adelman explains why he (and quite a few other prominent conservatives) are supporting Obama here: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/ And why Buckley is supporting Obama here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-10/the-conservative-case-for-obama .
And why Christopher Hitchins is supporting Obama here: http://www.slate.com/id/2202163/
------------
I used to nod wisely when people said: "Let's discuss issues rather than personalities." It seemed so obvious that in politics an issue was an issue and a personality was a personality, and that the more one could separate the two, the more serious one was. After all, in a debate on serious issues, any mention of the opponent's personality would be ad hominem at best and at worst would stoop as low as ad feminam.
At my old English boarding school, we had a sporting saying that one should "tackle the ball and not the man." I carried on echoing this sort of unexamined nonsense for quite some time—in fact, until the New Hampshire primary of 1992, when it hit me very forcibly that the "personality" of one of the candidates was itself an "issue." In later years, I had little cause to revise my view that Bill Clinton's abysmal character was such as to be a "game changer" in itself, at least as important as his claim to be a "new Democrat." To summarize what little I learned from all this: A candidate may well change his or her position on, say, universal health care or Bosnia. But he or she cannot change the fact—if it happens to be a fact—that he or she is a pathological liar, or a dimwit, or a proud ignoramus. And even in the short run, this must and will tell.
On "the issues" in these closing weeks, there really isn't a very sharp or highly noticeable distinction to be made between the two nominees, and their "debates" have been cramped and boring affairs as a result. But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week's so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.
I suppose it could be said, as Michael Gerson has alleged, that the Obama campaign's choice of the word erratic to describe McCain is also an insinuation. But really, it's only a euphemism. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear had to feel sorry for the old lion on his last outing and wish that he could be taken somewhere soothing and restful before the night was out. The train-wreck sentences, the whistlings in the pipes, the alarming and bewildered handhold phrases—"My friends"—to get him through the next 10 seconds. I haven't felt such pity for anyone since the late Adm. James Stockdale humiliated himself as Ross Perot's running mate. And I am sorry to have to say it, but Stockdale had also distinguished himself in America's most disastrous and shameful war, and it didn't qualify him then and it doesn't qualify McCain now.
The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: "What does he take me for?" Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party's right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama's position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.
It therefore seems to me that the Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this year, and that both its nominees for the highest offices in the land should be decisively repudiated, along with any senators, congressmen, and governors who endorse them.
I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that "issue" I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the "experience" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke. One only wishes that the election could be over now and a proper and dignified verdict rendered, so as to spare democracy and civility the degradation to which they look like being subjected in the remaining days of a low, dishonest campaign.
dood, if u think you're gonna get any significant tax cuts from mccain, you're dreaming. GOP is just as bad as Democrats, as the last 8 years have proved. smaller gov would be great. however, the gov has let things go awry, and no entity is big enuf to fix it but the government. the alternative is economic collapse, massive unemployment, economic stagnation. that doesn't hurt just the wrongdoers, it hurts everyone.
if you accept that a depression is not a valid option, then the only alternative is massive government intervention. paulson and others have been dragged kicking and screaming to that realization.
if we're in for big gov anyway, who is the one who is going to do it right, to jump-start the economy? mccain's ideas have been tried and failed. his solution is to prop up the housing market! all principles aside, i don't see how he is proposing anything that will work. and even if he had an idea, i don't see how he can get it passed and make it work; he doesn't have the popular or congressional support.
and yeah, i think the most liberal member of congress would be a great breath of fresh air, after the most conservative administration in history. i'm sick of the federal government promoting the agenda of the religious right. that's not conservative, in the libertarian sense. just the opposite.
oh, and yes, joe biden in a modest lifestyle. lets remember that the guy is in his 60s and he's living in the DC metro area. you have to adjust your standards by cost of living. why, how much do you think a senator earns? well, i guess its millions if you marry a rich beer heiress and publish 5 biographies.
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regarding your question about tenure of blame cast on the bush administration: this can truly go on for a very very long time. unfortunately for us, as a nation, the bush administration has massively reorganized governmental agencies and has been very secretive. the expose's can continue for months or years.
at least during the next few years, bush and hoover will compete for the bottom of the list of best american presidents. he will be a dumping ground and catch-all to explain everything that's bad about government and policy.
oh, i certainly won't argue with your point, that it really took the private sector to make these technologies into real game changers. my only point was that much of the real blue-sky research that proceeded the entry of the entrepreneurs preceeded their entry by at least a decade. industry research labs are generally much more narrowly focussed on things we'd generally call r&d, research with a shorter 5 year timeframe. an exception, in the past, was bell labs (which you cite implicitly in your reference to unix). xerox parc was another, where so many great things happened. those places are long gone. the only comparable might be microsoft research, but that's hardly targeted to "pure research". maybe google, but that's still more targeted to business enhancement rather than the really high-risk/high-payoff research projects.
yeah, japanese fifth-generation project was misguided. so was star wars, from the same period, at least as a technology initiative.
the only thing i can really put my finger on right now, that sort of has the same feel as those game changers, coming out of gov't sponsored pure research is everything that's come out of the human genome project. that has really blossomed and what we now know about the genome has produced lots of information. but nothing that entrepreneurs have really taken and run away with yet. it "feels like" we're gearing up to do the same thing with green technology, maybe even if oil prices continue to crater. but that also feels more like a "man on the moon" project, rather than a "put a PC in every office" project. at least in the near term.
"Computer networks of computers set up to talk to each other, including entire canonical network computing environment, such as ethernet and unix, had been invented and explored long before self-aggradizing fools like Al Gore came on the scene."
exactly my point! this was all funded by DARPA. pure research. in the 80's, university computer science departments all had internet access and lots of folks became depended on e-mail, all the students playing networked games, etc. we didn't need gore. all we needed was AOL and Compuserve and so forth, and things took off. but by that point it was a well developed technology, because of continued gov funding for two decades, going back to the 70s.
"planning and reasearch into the unknown is intrinsicly speculative, do you really want bureacrats engaged in speculations with your money?"
yes, i do, but in the manner that they're now involved. even venture captial has a much shorter timeframe than the pure research funded by NIH and NSF and the department of energy and DARPA (defense advanced research projects). but note, its not always "the government" deciding what directions to pursue. that's the role of peer review. nevertheless, we have always had gov initiatives that direct research towards important "grand challenges". weather modelling was one of them, and look at what we get now, with the kind of prediction we get for hurricanes, for example. there's a whole lot of research into fluid dynamics and high-performance computing that underlie that. gps, cdma, yadda yadda yadda. a whole host of things that probably would never have gotten off the ground if gov did not provide the initial funding, since few investors have the patience to promise to continue investing in the same line of research for 5 or 10 or 20 years - however long it takes to get some answers. if there's no promise of continued funding, you're just not gonna get people devoting their careers to working on those problems.
"or more detrimental by subsequently destroying the careers of men like Alan Turing."
indeed! if you live in calif, vote no on prop 8!
you write: "Funny thing is I dont recall reading that sentence worded that way in his book at all."
no, in fact the funny thing is that you don't recall reading the sentence in his book at all because the sentence you quote does not appear in his book. you picked it up from some fear-mongering right-wing site. gotcha.
here is the correction, easy to find on the web by just entering the quote into google. its been beaten to death on the blogs.
"I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."-Fiction!
This is a corruption of a quote from Obama's book The Audacity of Hope. It is from a section that talks about the concerns of immigrants who are American citizens.
Here is the accurate and more complete quote: "Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy pattern. In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific assurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."
i rest my case.
well, if you read the book and take the quote in context, then it is farfetched to assume that he's saying that if public opinion moves against muslims then the is going to stand behind saudi arabia and bahrain.
clearly he's saying that if public opinion turns against muslims, then he will stand on the side of american muslims and protect their rights.
we went through this during world war 2 with the internment of japanese. and we, as a nation, apologized and paid reparations. but the real test of whether we've learned anything from that episode would come in a test like this.
too bad treason doesn't including turning part of a major war effort over to a private company, which then turns around and moves itself to dubai. a company in which the current vice president has a significant personal stake.
well, of course, its the daily show. its a comedy show. granted, its probably harder to be interviewed by a comedian/journalist than a plain journalist. but you can't blame the interviewer for a candidate coming off bad. there's all this talk of "gotcha" journalism nowadays. heh. well that's what used to be called plain-old journalism. that you can nowadays blame the journalist for exposing weaknesses in your arguments, contradictions, or whatever is just silly, and should be rejected as silly. but there's just no excuse for that exchange:
"does being mayor of wasilla prepare you for being vice president?"
mayor of wasilla: "absolutely!"
"how?"
mayor of wasilla: hem. haw. um. "what do you mean?"
"well, what is a typical day of yours like?"
mayor of wasilla: "we have staff meetins on mondays. on thursdays, i sign checks."
priceless. of course, vp is pretty much a do-nothing job too. unless the president dies.
"Now thats a comforting thought"
indeed it is. and it is the only position that has a basis in our constitution. if indeed one believes in and respects and upholds our constitution, there is no other possible answer.
"Meanwhile, the Nikkei made a new 2008 low last night."
well, yes, but did you see the yen/dollar? capitulation in the carry trade.
"TJ, if Obama talks of sacrifice please tell me what THEY, the politicians are going to sacrifice? Will they cut their pay, decrease their benefits, cut back on their travel expenses and junkets, will they control THEIR own spending or are we the only ones that will sacrifice? HONESTLY?"
again, where do you see the best hope for this? as head of his class at harvard, obama could have made a small fortune practicing law. instead, he took the path of public service. biden too leads a relatively humble lifestyle. palin charges alaska per diem expenses for days that she's back in her own home and spends a small fortune on designer dresses and make-up.
but the real problem is this: if government doesn't pay competitively, then nobody will work in government. certainly not with the me-too culture that has been built up over the least few years. during these years, everyone wanted to go into the investment banks, hedge funds. go get an mba. high salaries for those jobs give everyone an incentive to go there. that's where the smartest are heading. (well, except for techies.) living in washington is expensive. without adequate salaries, the only people who can afford to work for the government are those who are independently wealthy. unfortunate. maybe we should move the capitol to nebraska.
its the same sort of problem that people identify with investment banker types. yeah, they probably start with salaries around $100k and maybe, at the vp level, are making $150k, and they get enormous bonuses. but they're living in new york city. in new york you're paying $3k a month for a 400 sq foot studio. eating lunch from a cart on the street is gonna cost you $8. relative to the cost of living, the salaries are not extreme.
"COME TJ, you cant NOT beleive that. He has been in office 8 years and on the very eve of the election, all of a sudden everyone gets religion."
i'm not saying that there weren't problems at fanny and freddy. i'm not saying that democrats are blameless. but all this happened on bush's watch. congress rubber stamped all policy coming from the white house and RNC for 6 years. there were no hearings, no public analysis of these issues by congress for all those years.
sure, many people must have known that this was coming, because i knew all this was coming, and i have far less information than many others.
but the question isn't who is to blame. it is, where do we go from here? if everything had gone swimmingly over the last 8 years, i want to see ron paul as president. i'm a libertarian, after all.
but we're in a big mess. who is the realist here? i listen to fox news, as i'm doing right now, and person after person comes on and says, oh, just let all the banks fail, no bailout, yadda yadda. these people are not realists. they don't get it. the banks haven't lost *their* money, they lost *our* money. there are principles. and then there is the recognition that there are critical times when government is the only one that can step in and hope to fix problems without everything falling apart. unfortunately, the consequence of that will be regulation, to make sure that moral hazard doesn't raise its head in the future. but the experiment on deregulation and trickle down has been run. and it has failed. greenspan himself has finally admitted that the whole notion is flawed.
however, getting your panties in a bunch over fannie and freddy, and not yelling aboug phil graham and legislation helping bear and morgan stanley and goldman is completely one-sided.
yet, i think, the simple question for this election is: which candidate will gather the right people in the room, will listen to them, and will settle on the best plan to take us forward? which candidate will have the support and the skill to convince the public to go along with that plan, even if it is painful? obama talks of sacrifice and people cheer him. mccain says he wants to give you your money back and get government out of your way. i think only one of these will have the political capital to enact the significant change that is needed. even if i liked his ideas, i'm confident that mccain would be an impotent president. and that is exactly what we don't need now.
"You have yet to explain how or why the SMART Biden/Obama connection cant spell or know how many states there are? Are they dumb? And I now will ask a question that I hope you would answer HONESTLY is that if she, Palin, had made that same statements as Biden/Obama would you be giving the same answer or does your bias prevent you from being honest like most that take sides?"
palin can't tell you what newspapers she reads. she can't give a coherent answer to a question that she hasn't memorized. that's what i see. she can of course prove me and everyone else wrong by doing exactly what every other candidate - mccain, obama, biden - has done, what every nominee has done, what every vice presidential candidate in the history of this nation has done, which is to give a press conference where she actually answers the questions posed to her. she can go on "face the nation" or "meet the press". biden had done that numerous times and, despite his gaffes, shows that he has great command of facts and ideas beyond memorized talking points. all of them can do this, mccain, obama, biden. why not hockey mom?
so now she has a new plan: special needs kids. so the gov is going to go on an austerity budget under mccain and the best educated kids in the nation are gonna be the autistic and the retarded. i don't mean to sound heartless here, but really, one has to have one's priorities straight. and these are federalists. ha! what a muddled mess of policy and pander.
"and exactly what is Obama going to do with his columns?"
non-issue. this is not addressed by mccain-feingold and your argument is merely going to lead to the conclusion that all political rallies should be held in open fields, no chairs, no cameras, no balloons. the point, that you're trying to lead away from, is that mccain-feingold campaign reform explicitly addresses the use of campaign contributions for personal wardrobe. it does not address using campaign contributions to pay for a campaign event, like a televised rally that draws 70 million viewers. $150K is cheap for a prop for a televised rally that reaches 70 million voters. $150K is extravagant for the personal wardrobe of a "hockey mom" trying to appeal to "joe 6-pack", unless she's trying to appeal to his penis, of course.
"SMART PEOPLE, give me a break, again do you want the list of gaffs, stupid statements by ALL of the parties and you stand on the holier than though elitist type soapbox."
hmm. someone was top of his class at harvard law school. someone else pays $150k for her wardrobe. who is the elistist?
gimme a break. when we interview job candidates, we look for the smartest, the best communicators. everybody misstates things sometimes. does joe biden really think "jobs" is a 3-letter word? jeez, does it matter? did dan quayle really think potato ends with an "e"? well, maybe, but does it really matter? but sarah palin won't even do a press conference. these are not equivalent.
yeah, i want someone smart to run the government. because the stupid are easily manipulated. is it just a coincidence that bin laden has gotten everything that he ever wanted from bush? (1) u.s. bases out of saudi arabia, (2) higher oil prices, (3) u.s. involved in a costly protracted war that saps our national will and treasure, (4) u.s. on the verge of financial collapse.
"The world markets are dumping their stocks right now with the thought of NObama getting into office"
the world markets are dumping because the illusion of the bush years has completely unravelled and we now find that we've made no progress in the last 8 years. markets are tanking as the rich panic in a run on the hedge funds.
"but if you dont have a problem in paying more taxes, then have you? I mean its not against the law to send in MORE than your supposed to so did you?"
well, no, you can't. if you do send in more, the IRS will recalculate it and return your overpayment.
but lets be clear here: i have no interest in paying taxes and seeing that money thrown away. just as when investing in a company, you want to see smart and competent management. investing in this administration's government would be like buying stock in Enron or AIG. fiscal, monetary, international, domestic policy have been non-existent. cronyism at its worst.
i want to see someone smart in charge, someone who will talk with smart people, develop smart policies and then sell them to the public effectively. i'm sick of president know-nothing. i'm sick of an administration that is constantly trying to sell its own (clearly wrong) version of reality. on top of all that, the possiblity of a president palin is a complete deal breaker. ya know, i love my mom, but i wouldn't want her to run for president. (for fun, check out the interview with the current mayor of wasilla, and you tell me that position trains one for being president - about 2 mins into this clip. very funny!
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=188638&title=understanding-real-america-in
you look at the candidates and ask, who has a better chance of reforming social security and medicare, for example, of *solving* these problems. from observing these candidates, i have to conclude that mccain would base his plans on conservative principles, yadda yadda, and he'd have no chance of passing it. but obama is the realist: i have much greater confidence that he'll come up with the leanest toughest plan that he can actually sell to the public. nobody is going to accept any degree of "sacrifice" for mccain; that's not his message.
"and btw, the clothing allowance is a bit beneath most reasonable people"
a bit!!! you're too kind. $150K is three times the average yearly salary. her clothing allowance is more than half a typical house. and lets also observe that it is illegal, by mccain-feingold, to spend campaign contributions on your clothing. yeah yeah, you get around that with some loophole by adding "oh we're gonna sell them or give them to charity". bah. mccain-feingold. mccain! where have i heard that name before?
unfortunately the computer was in development since ww2. the internet was in development since the early 80s. financial engineering was growing during the 90s. what's been in development over the last decade that's ready to break out at this time? research funding has been cut way back during the bush years: nsf budget sucks and darpa, which funded much of the early internet and computing research, was redirected towards short-term goals rather than blue-sky research projects. bell labs closed up shop and "research" in industry has generally had a short timeframe. i don't see anything ready to break out. the bush years have been a period of little progress. perhaps ironically, the market has erased all gains of that period as well.
"As of November 5, 2008, when President Obama is officially elected into office, our company will instill a few new policies which are in keeping with his new, inspiring issues of change and fairness"
you obama fear-mongers are really funny. i betcha that i'm the only one on this board that has a salary that makes him subject to obama's proposed tax increase. and yet i seem to be the only one here to support him as well.
odd how the powers that be have effectively brainwashed folks into voting against their own self-interest.
oh, and i don't have a problem with paying more in taxes - president cheney has been overly good to me over the last years - and i *do* see that as something done in my self-interest.
so ya think after all those folks "clean out their desks", a president palin would send them off to eat mud at the curbside? hmm, well after katrina, i wouldn't even be surprised by a "yes" answer to that question. but watch out for that payroll tax to support ms. palin's clothing addiction and personal make-up artist!
no, that was a retest of the 10/10 bottom.
"Markets should have been closed weeks ago.This panic is better?I think not."
i've heard greenspan and rubin talk about 87, and the thing that they're proud of is that they didn't close the markets, because - as they said - the biggest problem facing you is how you reopen them. the received wisdom from that experience seems to be that closing the markets is the wrong thing to do and just increases panic and desperation.
hussman is bullish for a good reason! those who are leveraged are being forced to sell at a discount. selling is disconnected from fundamentals. if you're an investor, this presents great opportunities.
parker the bull sez: moo.
well blodgett follows yahoo pretty religiously. when it cracked $12 he posted "Yahoo Cracks $12, Valuation Now Officially Ridiculous"
http://www.alleyinsider.com/yahoo
damn, wish i had thought of taxes
wrong! the magic word was "plumber"
"he looks scary"
but its generally best to have the scary guy on your side.
nikkei is not open today
but the cds settlement for LEH turned out to be a non-event, albeit one with much collateral damage.
hmm. they suggest something about tuesday but not about monday?
well there's agreement in europe (still has to be ratified later this week) to guarantee bank transactions. there's news on ms and UK and german bailout.
i see futures up about 3.5% on SPX right now.
Most people work in factories, construction, shops and suchlike don't they? I don't see how that's Middle Class.
well i probably agree with you. but i said "self-identify". probably as long as you can see someone else worse off than you, you will identify yourself as middle class.
"Guess the killing of those born alive is acceptable to you ..."
no, but this is not the role of government.
i'd take the rantings of the anti-abortion clan more seriously if they seriously put an effort into preventing unwanted pregnancies in the first place - broad and effective birth control education and availability, for example - and showed some interest in the health and education of these poor children once they showed a smidgen of conscious thought.
yeah krugman makes that same observation.