Exactly right.

Ummm, no. The skills required to be a good engineer are not the skills required to be a good manager of engineers. There's some overlap, sure, but you can be an outstanding engineer but have poor leadership skills, or be an amazing and revered leader but terrible at actually designing the stuff your people are working on.

You should be in charge of exactly as many people as you are good at being in charge of. That's unrelated to how good you are at being one of the workers.

But now let's totally eliminate the barrier between graphics, sound and all other processors. Instead of limited communications channels and local memory, have distributed shared memory (DSM) and totally free communication between everything.

This sounds a lot like NUMA. Which, I might add, absolutely requires differentiating between local and non-local memory, since the latter is much slower.

Thus, memory can open a connection to the GPU,

Like GPUs have done since the time of AGP? Or did you mean memory will simply send some random data for no particular reason?

the GPU can talk to the disk,

For what purpose? Do you plan to write a file system driver that runs on the GPU? To accomplish... what, exactly speaking?

Ethernet cards can write direct to buffers rather than going via software (RDMA and OpenSockets concepts, just generalized).

Haven't they done this a long time now? In fact, don't all devices that do significant IO use direct memory access?

What room, in such a design, for a CPU? Everything can be outsourced.

And the part that keeps track of the overall program execution state and issues these outsources tasks to other components is, for all intents and purposes, a CPU.

Have the router elements take care of heat and congestion issues, rather than compilers.

...What the heck are you talking about?

And this is marketspeak? Marketspeak for what? Name me a market that wants to eliminate complexity and abandon planned obsolescence in favour of a schizophrenic cross between a parallel Turing machine, a vector computer and a Beowulf cluster.

None does. It's the "schizophrenic" part that's the killer. Which is why, if you need to sell garbage anyway, you litter your product description with enough trendy buzzwords to convince technologically illiterate that it's cutting edge high tech. Which, if you are trying to polish a particularly smelly turd for a sale, can end up using almost all of them. And that can have great synergy with illusion-challenged human resources seeking a solution for cynicism management.

Absolutely.. Just pointing out that we should be equally skeptical of self-proclaimed skeptics.

That right there is economist talk, and do not hold up to a reality check what so ever.

You have a very odd view of reality.

Idle production equipment is not wasted.

By definition that which is not used is wasted.

Idle workers are not wasted (unless they happens to still get paid).

Idle workers still need to eat, so either the factory pays them or the taxpayer will. But unfortunately, with all economic activity crippled by lack of energy, just like the factory was, there are no taxpayers any more, so there seems to be a small problem.

Sure, there is a "loss" of potential profits if the market is screaming for the widgets the factory is providing.

That, and people aren't getting the widgets. That's too bad if it's an iPhone factory, and worsel if it makes heart medicine.

But unless some book worm economist set up the whole gig, every damn widget produced, be at 0.01% production capacity or 100% capacity, is a profit earner once sold.

This might surprise you, but both buildings and machinery require maintenance. Furthermore, neither raw materials nor products simply teleport around, and the overhead of moving them is the greater the less you have. And finally, as I already noted, a lot of production processes can't simply be arbitrarily slowed - apart from chemical factories, how about things like casting molten stuff?

Your fridge can stand to shut down for five minutes to ride out a sudden but brief peak in demand. Those do happen.

My fridge can't shut down for days or weeks to ride out a period of calm and cloudy weather. Those also happen.

Also, are you suggesting the electric company gets an itemized list of every gadget I run? Because unless the fridge reports itself as such, I have a hard time imagining how you plan on cutting power to it without leaving me sitting in the dark.

The 'Corrie Break' is a very well-known example, occuring predictably during the mid-episode break of Coronation Street in the UK - it's caused by millions of people simutainously going to put the kettle on.

Indeed. So how do you suggest handling lunchtime? Should we just get used to treating warm food as a rare luxury in the green future?

If you're in an area that uses a water tower or top-of-building tank for pressure though, then the pump can be shut down during a deman peak.

I'm not, and if I was, I'd need to heat the tank to keep it from freezing. And of course pumping water needlessly high first and letting it down again means wasting power on friction.

You want real value for your real things.

The problem, of course, is that they're your chickens and land only because people agree so. Property rights are no less imaginary than currency.

The truth of the matter is that "value" is an entirely made-up concept. A chicken has no property of being valuable; all value you ascribe to it is entirely in your own imagination. Which is of course what allows people to value things differently, thus making trade possible. So it's only appropriate that we use a made-up concept of currency as an abstract representation for the made-up concept of value - or economic value, to precise.

In other words, there is not - and cannot even in theory be - non-funny money. Value being subjective is the very heart of the concept of economy. And that means any imaginable way of measuring it is ultimately just make-believe.

Gold and perhaps silver are credible currencies.

Well, no, because I have no convenient way of checking either the purity nor mass of any gold I might get, and a metal-backed currency can stop being so at any time. On top of that, gold is soft enough for wear being a problem, but still too hard to cut pieces off as needed, so we'd be stuck with precut gold pieces (coins) which can't be actually trusted to carry their nominal value due to wear and theft.

On a purely technical level, without getting into any economics or ideology, gold makes for a horrible currency.

"Block all cell signals so the looters can't send their movies anywhere. That's illegal, you say? And looting and pillaging isn't?"

Yes, because the reason people want video of what actually happens is to prove that they were breaking the law! They certainly don't want footage of the cops breaking the law! Oh no. That would be foolish! Foolish I say. Everyone know cops don't break the law! Nixon minimized the facts! It's not just true that it's not illegal if the President does it. Oh no. It's not illegal if a cop does it! If someone steals some cigars, why that's illegal! Now if a cop shoots the criminal, he isn't breaking the law. No sir! He's just doing his job! His job is to stop crime, and if he has to kill people to save a few cigars, well I for one am all for it!

Signed - Some idiot dick Zeman

"Better to just not own/use a smartphone.. or a cellphone at all."

I'm going to second this exceedingly wise advice, and up it with some even better advice. When battling gunman, don't bring a gun. Someone might get shot!

Demand is far easier to manipulate.

No, it isn't. I need power for food storage, food preparation, Internet access and light. I also consume water, which takes power to prepare and pump. Trying to make any of these too expensive for me to afford - which is the reality behind talk of "incentives" - means it's time for torches & pitchforks.

Turn a factory on full power when the wind is blowing and slow it down when the wind isn't.

This means the factory is running at less than full speed on average, making it less profitable and thus more prone to be shut down. That's bad news for the employees and owners both. And that's assuming the factory can simply "slow down". Try reducing power to a chemical plant and it'll enter an emergency shutdown mode, hopefully only losing the raw materials under processing at the time (as opposed to, say, having them solidify in pipes or reactor vessels, or even outright exploding) but coincidentally creating work for hazardous waste disposal companies.

"Actually, even janitors and low level administration staff make a difference."

(Make_a_Difference != Make_a_Business_Decision)

That being said, I already acknowledged that secretaries make business decisions. Janitors, however, while making a difference, do not make business decisions.