As it happens, I was just wondering to myself this morning how much of our present right-wing enthusiasm for our current economic system is rooted in capitalist democracy being far, far, far superior to pre-COBOL Stalinism. The true test arrives when some Asian economic model arises, one very different from our own historical model, and kicks us in the pants.

It's sad, really, that "market-based" turned into such a horrible cliche. Most of the damage was caused by so many people putting it in front of "solution" (market-based solution) when what they really meant was market-based approach.

Many don't even realize that these two phrases are different, because they've defined "market-based approach" as being the solution, as it was and ever shall be, dating all the way back to pre-COBOL Stalinism.

It is, in fact, possible to design markets—markets are a human construction—that create more problems than they solve.

Ideology is when you play epsilon-delta with an infinite sleeve of mulligans. If this market fails, that just means we need to change something and try again. Even market failures are characterized as stepping stones to progress.

Personally, I'm not willing to drink mulligan Kool-Aid. I love markets that work. I hate markets that don't. It sure would be nice at the outset if it was more obvious which was which, without greater society picking up the tab for all the hooks and shanks.

UPS: $100

Battery: $35

That's more like $65 less, or 35% of the cost. The battery costs about 1/3 as much as the UPS. So your UPS cost $38 and your batteries cost $12?

Which is why I roll my eyes at the people proclaiming their UPS goes on their cable modem and firewall, not their computer.

Actually, this is all stuff known to project managers.

When a project is initiated, the Project Manager first creates a Project Charter. This is done by identifying stakeholders (people doing the work, people affected by the work, people receiving deliverables... any individual or group who affects, is affected by, or perceives itself to be affected by any activity or outcome of the project) and gathering preliminary project requirements. Essentially, the project manager talks to the stakeholders to roughly determine what we're trying to accomplish, how we're going to accomplish it, how much we want to spend, and how much time we're willing to take. That's written up as the charter.

After this, real requirements are gathered. Work is broken down in a Work Breakdown Structure, a hierarchical decomposition of deliverables in which each level is fully broken out into lower levels. The entire project is level 1; level 2 is the major deliverables (Including project management itself, as well as phases or components, testing, validation, documentation, hand-off, and final project closing); and those are broken out into the deliverables which make them up. The final level of deliverables is the Work Package, a complete unit of work which can be understood and managed. Work Packages are broken out into Tasks and Activities--things to do which can be assigned, and which are required to produce the Work Package.

To do all of this, the Project Manager must consult the Project Team. The Project Team will know what components go into building the deliverable output as requested. The project team will be able to estimate their competency and experience with the various components. The Project Manager will use historical information to come up with rough scheduling and budget numbers for each Work Package and Task; but the Project Team will raise issues such as that the historical information was in a wildly different context, that the people who did the work are not on this project, and so on, which means that the work may take more or less time. These factor into the baseline schedule and into the management and contingency reserves (the extra time allotted based on how likely a task should take--in theory, a programmer can write a decompression module in 4 hours, but it's 90% likely to take less than 5 hours, and a 90% success rate is targeted, so we budget 4h with a contingency reserve of 1h).

In the end, the engineers will inform the project manager of what can and can't be done, what effort goes into it, how long it may take, and so on. The Project Manager will have stakeholders prioritize deliverables, and then have them select which deliverables to cut from the project if they can't make time or budget. If the engineers tell you they simply can't build this in 5 months, you either give them 7 months or you give up enough requirements to shave 2 months off the project. You could also identify underutilization of resources in non-critical paths, and crash or fast-track the schedule by assigning more people to those tasks which may be done in parallel rather than in serial.

That's what managers are for.

And incessant lawsuits.

Funny you should say that since the Libs want to:

- control what I do in my bedroom
- control my social life
- control what I talk about
- control who I do business with
- control what I believe
- control what business I'm allowed to engage in

It's time to reassess your opinion on who wants to to micromanage your life.

However the problem is that it can presumably notify security that you've done that. Given that they'll have full video of it, and know where the unit was, the chances of you getting caught are pretty high.

These aren't the kind of thing that would work well on their own out in the middle of nowhere but on a campus like MS's with human backup I imagine they are pretty effective. Rolling security cameras basically.

Because people are simple, and everything is both simple and complex. I can explain to you how to solve poverty; the solution is simple, but incredibly nuanced. It's a very short list of policy features, but it avoids an incredible number of policy features that would create sub-optimal or even destructive results. It relies on a handful of economic concepts which, when explained, amount to massively complex interconnected systems, which in turn come down to simple human behavioral psychology, which in turn becomes incredibly complex when examined deeper.

People are often keen to take the simplistic--supply and demand versus competition--and claim simple behaviors. Supply of houses? Prices will come down because more houses can be built, more apartments can be offered. This explanation ignores risk, ignores the cost risk of building more housing such that supply exceeds demand, ignores the nuanced scarcity of housing (there's plenty, but you can only get a given apartment or house at a given time, and they're all non-fungible), and ignores that people will routinely pay the common above-cost price even if some other market player has the same good cheaper. Prices don't just continuously drop when competition shows up; prices can even creep upwards in a competitive market, as competitors learn that a $500 good and a $515 good both sell, and then everyone sells it for $515 until some competitors start selling it for $530 and don't take a loss in sales volume.

People don't like this. They say, "No, you would lower your price to attract more business. If one person did it and then had more business than he could handle, and the others didn't drop prices, another competitor would enter the market at the low price." That doesn't fucking work.

And I'm sorry, but what doesn't hold water is an argument that the Sierra Club is interested in saving anyone money.

They want the plant shut down, period.

"The utility, National Grid, said shutting it down could make local power supplies less reliable..."

Hugh says it could be fixed by boosting transmission capacity.

Hmmm...The Utility or Hugh? Utility or Hugh?

I think I'll go with the Utility on that one.

They're lawyers; they're concerned with whether they can provide enough annoyance before a legal barratry charge sets in.

You do understand the invested money doesn't actually go into the company's coffers, right?

Low-density, high-impact shit like solar panels and hydroelectric dams? Sure, let's bulldoze the environment.

It seems to me a local utility can either generate power, mark up over cost, and pay taxes on profits; or import power, mark up over cost, and pay taxes on profits. These are the same. They claim they would lose jobs, but wasteful spending creates economic strain and reduces the total eventual jobs: in 5 years, moving to the cheaper option would provide a stronger and more robust economy.

Their behavior is consistent with an overly-emotional ruling class clique than with sociopathy.