I tend to ignore GDP as an indicator because it's utterly useless. My favorite indicator is AGI, and the best indicators are things like per-capita income and proportion of money spent on things. Even those distort: in the 70s, you made $13k and spent $7k on a car; in 2014, you made $65k and spent $32k on a brand new Camaro--that's less, 49% instead of 53%--yet the damn Camaro has a much-better-engineered engine, suspension, drive train, electronic stability control, satellite navigation system, five-DVD MP3 changer, built-in Spotify, etc. Not to mention people tend to measure cost of the car by amortization of aggregate car payment, maintenance, fuel, insurance, and so forth.

I've given the 15-paragraph explanation of wealth growth over time too many times. People respond mostly by freaking out or mis-interpreting it as supply-and-demand economics (it's not even vaguely supply-and-demand), because it's a god damn brand new theory, because historians have briefly commented on things like the Industrial Revolution without actually writing the damn pattern down. The above is the short of it, so you can work out the unifying theory of economics yourself and figure out why it's hard to measure economic growth and productivity. Bonus points if you suddenly understand why supply doesn't just increase, instead of price; why some markets overcharge huge mark-ups, and how competition does and doesn't control this; and what technical condition will occur if communism is suddenly the correct economic practice.

Aside from that, a one-time cash infusion does very little, kind of like if you drop off 500 pounds of rice to an Ethiopian and never feed him again.

This is why I said, up-thread, that we should consider perhaps that the F16 is superior, and that maybe we don't need to build new planes unless we're having trouble winning wars, since we used to have trouble fighting obviously-inferior MIG fighters 30 years out of date with our state-of-the-art hardware.

It sounds to me like our current crop of F16 fighters are superior. Why do we have a $1 trillion plane? I'm not saying it's a lot of money--it's only about $100bn every year, maybe less, for 10 years of development; and even $1 trillion right now one time wouldn't be a world-changing amount of money--but this is a lot of waste that could have gone elsewhere, for no obvious purpose. Somebody said, "We need better planes!", and I question why, when we have such fantastic planes, and when historical wars included clearly-inferior planes like MIG fighters wiping the floor with models three decades more up-to-date.

Drone pilots are actually burning out due to extreme crisis of conscious issues. They work 9-5 killing people, then go home to their families; they're not living in a constructed fantasy of good versus evil fueled by the fact that other people are living in the same fantasy and mutually trying to kill you under the impression that you're the invader. They see themselves as terrible assassins, not righteous heroes fighting a murderous enemy.

Ich mag es nicht wenn andere underbrachen meine Meditation.

I must speak to Keitel, Jodl, Krebs, and Borgdorf.

Pretty much, yes. Mind you, this starts getting into the same line of thinking that laws and police and prisons don't help, because arresting and imprisoning someone happens after a crime: some people surmise there is no deterrent effect, and so we would have exactly as much crime and as many murders and thefts and assaults and rapes if we just gave up on policing and shut down all the prisons.

That's not because of speech; it's because of consequences. You repeatedly tell some gay faggot he's a gay deepthroating faggot giving everyone AIDS and he has severe emotional issues because you're an asshole? LAWSUIT FOR HARASSMENT! You make up a bunch of shit about a dude having sex with 11-year-old girls? LAWSUIT FOR FUCKING UP HIS SOCIAL LIFE! You scream into a crowd and cause panic and rioting? CHARGES FOR CAUSING PERSONAL DAMAGE, PROPERTY DAMAGE, AND CIVIL UNREST!

Lawsuits come from standing; criminal charges come from criminal intent, such as hiring someone to murder people.

Competition works as thus: supplying the first units of a thing requires less labor (less cost) than supplying further units, unless you have an advantage (a more productive mine, local access to materials, better processes); you can inflate your prices to some point below what the next guy can charge. If it costs you $100/unit to build, and the next guy spends $150/unit, you can raise your prices as high as $150/unit; you can keep your prices as low as $100/unit to undercut and weaken the competition; you cannot go below $100/unit, and your competition cannot go below $150/unit, without taking losses and risking business failure.

Whenever I explain wealth, people tell me I'm full of shit because reducing costs doesn't reduce price to consumers. They then turn around and argue something magical about competition driving prices down.

Thing is he bought generic domain names, and has a right to own them. He's had it for 15 years. They're claiming that's just fine, and that he could sell it to them, but didn't; then, when it expired and he renewed, they claimed he doesn't have the right to RETAIN his property (we treat domains as property, because we consider the purchase of lease as ownership, not licensing: YOU CAN SELL YOUR DOMAINS TO OTHER PEOPLE).

In effect, if you own a domain, and another company thinks they have a claim to it that does not predate your ownership, all they have to do is wait for renewal. When it comes time for your domain to expire, renewing it is treated as buying it new. If you owned Windows.com 5 years before Microsoft made Windows, Microsoft couldn't do shit; if you renewed it when it expired 8 years later, Microsoft could treat you exactly like you just registered Windows.com that day, claiming you maliciously started infringing on their trademark, even if you weren't infringing before due to prior ownership. Renewal is new ownership.

It's a bullshit approach. The plaintiff is suing because they've come up with a name, found someone else owns the name, and don't want to buy the property.

That's exactly what it means, you thick titanium plank. It means you can say Obama is a cock-sucking negro ape and the thought police won't come to your house for speaking ill of the president! It means you can say Bush staged 9/11 and not have black helicopters show up to abduct you from work! That's the whole point of freedom: to exempt you from certain consequences of certain actions!

Your argument was that some stupid intern you hired might not be able to figure out how to use an encryption key, so the process should be simple; then it was that keys and documents get lost, and you should be a good enough admin to know wtf you're doing; now it's that you have the whole process memorized, being the veteran resident expert on the business's particular system and having designed it from the ground up.

Let's refresh your memory:

As well,

In the last decade, we've moved on to virtualization, infrastructure as a service, and document stores like MongoDB. Last decade, when you were doing this shit, you probably had huge SQL relational databases, which are like collections of giant CSV files with indexes; those databases were a step forward from LDAP, a form of hierarchical database, basically a giant file system with tiny files; while document stores are basically giant collections of XML- or JSON-like data, with indexes. Routers are now ASAs, with 10 MICROSECOND switching while deep-packet-inspecting 26 gigabytes of data per second, thanks to using ASIC logic instead of general-purpose CPUs; switches operate on layer 3, analyzing IP headers, because why not blur the line between what is a fucking switch and what is a router?

Not to say that old skill sets don't found new skill sets, but we have managed to get rather dated here rather quickly. I've compensated largely by constantly collecting more information and keeping a broad knowledge base, rather than staying current in a single technology. Everything from financial systems to devops, from back-ups to system programming, has some level of competence on my skill sheet--some of them are very low levels of competence, some (like Unix administration) are such high levels of competence that I'm over-invested, to the point that I can use awk to impressive but wholly-unnecessary effect.

I branched out into project management because this is just too much crap to use effectively any other way, which is why I have comments on long-term planning, and particularly on risk management. Losing an encryption key is one of the most minor risks I can imagine, and every scenario you suggest is patently ridiculous. Twenty-year-old back-ups? A process that hasn't changed while the data center around it has undergone disruptive transformations? Keys owned by employees, rather than static in the back-up system and transferred off-site over key exchange protocols? People overwrite tapes every year in a cycle; your back-up process would not work if not updated to keep up with your data center's needs; and any such stupidity as poor encryption key handling would be projected early in the process, or else you're completely incompetent and likely won't have working back-ups anyway.

Wu claims Google's first informational result is a "search result", rather than differentiating between content and information searches. Google isn't providing its own result first; it's providing an answer to a semantic question.

There are three types of searches: Official contact (what is the home page of Microsoft?); research (find me a bunch of information about lions); and simple information (what time is it in Brazil?). Google often gives any simple query related to a particular entity an Official Contact result first (e.g. searching for Windows 10 will give you the Microsoft page for Windows 10 first), and starts with a Simple Information result if the search looks informational (e.g. what is the national animal of Scotland?).

Wu fails to differentiate, instead seeing a search engine as a research platform: if you ask for any topic, you are asking for a library of writings on the topic, rather than trying to find a specific and utterly small piece of information.

Yeah, I bought a $1000 machine to make a $2 battery cover for my phone.

In the industry, they call it the "lost wax process"...