You can appreciate the work ethic without subscribing to the religious view. After all, some of the hardest working communities (e.g. Asians or Jews) appreciate the value of hard work and diligence, and have nothing to do with Calvinism in the religious sense.
Given that Ford earned $7.2 Billion in net income in 2013 and GM made a $3.8 billion profit over the same period I think GM and Ford will be very surprised to hear that they cannot make cars in the US profitably since most of their profit comes from US operations.
They'd only be surprised if you told them they'd be doing it in Detroit, instead of non-union plants in other U.S. states:
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/us/...
You don't need to expand factories to make the efficient.
Correct. You just need to reduce the number of employees to increase the profit per employee, which is something you can do with automation, and.or lower wages, which is not something you can do in Michigan.
If you're interested in high tech manufacturing with a skilled workforce, it would be hard to find a better place than the automation alley counties. What you'll spend in wages will be more than made up in productivity. And you won't be spending a fortune in recruiting costs. If you build a factory your staffing problem won't be finding qualified workers, engineers or tradesmen, but getting a big enough HR department to hire them.
The reason all but one automotive assembly line has pulled out of Detroit is that the unions wouldn't allow that much automation, or you were "allowed" to have it, but you had to still hire the same number and type of workers to satisfy the contracts, so it didn't do crap to change your value to unit labor cost ratio.
You are an absolute idiot if you locate a manufacturing facility in a state where the unions are in charge of whether or not you get labor, and you can't push costs down by automation.
Most blue collar jobs have migrated outside the U.S. due to inflated labor costs relative to value produced. It has dick all to do with what a living wage is or isn't, and *absolutely everything* to do with value produced per unit labor cost. Most U.S. auto manufacturing that still exists in the U.S. at all is in non-union states, in non-union shops.
As Steve Jobs said, "Those jobs are gone, and they're not coming back". Near the end, before they sold it to Canon, the NeXT factory producing laser printers required exactly two (2) full time workers to operate the entire factory.
You are clubbing all the 1% into a single group. There's a study by Saez and Zucman of Berkley/LSE that talks about how clubbing the entire 1% into a single group is disingenuous -- The other wealth gapâ"the 1% vs the 0.01%.
Most of the 1% to
The surge in 1% is entirely attributable to the growth in capital of the
Most government policies favor the really rich and *punish* the hardworking upper middle classes. In fact, I would argue in favor of Reagan-esque tax policies for these folks, who are for the most part well educated, successful individuals in banking, law, medicine, technology, consulting and so on. These are the ones who are really building the economy, but the ones who are being punished by the government and vilified by the mass media who club them with the truly wealthy.
Imagine a successful husband and wife earning $150k/year, working in a white collar job (lawyers, doctors, consultants, IT -- take your pick). According to the IRS, making $343k/year puts you in the top 1% (by income). But what about wealth? Well, that's supposedly $8.4MM.
Some simple math will make it evident that a husband and wife earning (an average) of $171k for 40 years (assume raises and lower starter incomes are factored into the average) who save 15% of their annual income, with a starting principal of $10000 will have ~$5.4 MM at the end of their careers. Assume that they invested in a home that cost $300k early in their careers, whose value has gone up 5X in the 30 year time that they had to pay off the mortgage. Assume that they more or less maxed out their 401K, giving them $17,500.00/year for 40 years each, which is ~$1.4MM. At best, they have $8.4 MM, assuming market crashes, children's education, and life threatening diseases didn't wipe out their savings.
However, by virtue of having $8.4 MM, suddenly, these people are being placed in the *same* category as someone with enough capital to buy legislation or pay an army of Cravath lawyers. That is not factoring in any smart investing in what's been a pretty bullish run (minus the recent crisis) or basic fiscal conservatism.
OK, as someone who has been trying different methods of QoS over the past years, with varying levels of success, mainly to have my VoIP phone rock solid over DSL, I'm very interested in what you're saying.
Is there a reason this approach hasn't been implemented yet? Does it break something? If my router is lying to one my upstream router about its TCP window size, wouldn't that impact both the FTP and video stream?
You lie about the window size on a per connection basis, so no, since it's not a global policy, it's a resource policy by application, and potentially by port/IP tuple, so it's not a problem. The point is to keep the upstream router packet buffers relatively empty so that the packets you want don't have to be RED-queued. Nothing breaks because of it.
It generally won't work, unless everyone "plays fair", and the port overcommit ratio for upstream vs. downstream bandwidth is relatively low. As the downstream data rate increases to approach the upstream data rate, the technique loses value, unless you get rid of overcommit, or do it on a per-customer "flow" basis (as opposed to a per virtual circuit "flow" basis) within the upstream router itself, or move to a "resource container" or similar approach for buffer ratio allocation in the upstream router.
So in theory, Comcast (as an example) could do it if they made everyone use the router they supplied, and their routers all participates in limiting upstream buffer impact.
Maybe the next time they replace everyone's cable modems, they'll bother to do it?
Without the deployed infrastructure, it's easier to RED-queue and just intentionally drop packets, forcing a client to request a retransmit as a means of source-quenching traffic. This wastes a lot of buffers, but they probabilistically get through, and for streaming video, that's good enough if there's a lot of client overbuffering going on before playback starts (JWZPlayer, for example, is a common player used for pirated content that will habitually under-buffer so intentional drops tend to make it choppy).
For VOIP, unfortunately, forced retransmit causes things to just typically suck, unless you use a sideband protocol instead, where the router at the one hop upstream peer agrees to reserve buffers for specifically that traffic. This is why Skype is terrible, but your phone calls over your wall jacks which are actually wired to the same packet interface instead of a POTS line are practically as good as a land line or cell phone.
Google hangouts tend to get away with it because they are predominantly broadcast, and are either "gossip"-based CSMA/CD (ALOHA style) networks between participants (i.e. people talk over each other, or wait until the other end is done before talking themselves). It means they tolerate large latencies in which 1:1 VOIP/Skype connections won't. They can be a bit of a PITA for conference calls because of that (Google uses it internally, and gets away with it, but mostly because Google has its own, parallel Internet, including transoceanic fibers), but if Google employees never see the problem, they never fix the problem. Same way any company that assumes local-equivalent bandwidth works as well for their customers as it does for them (free hint to Microsoft inre: Office 386 there).
Never bring politics... to an electronic documentation of timeline fight with a database company.
Almost all router bandwidth management is shit.
Bandwidth management schemes currently used by everything you mention are all base on rate limiting packet delivery based on some mythical QoS value, and they ignore the actual problem that the people who are using these things are attempting (and failing) to address.
The problem is that the point of a border routers is to hook a slower border uplink to a faster interior connection; on the other end of the slower uplink, you have a faster ISP data rate. In other words, you have a gigabit network in your house, and the ISP has a gigabit network at their DSLAM, but your DSL line sure as hell is *NOT* a gigabit link.
What that means is that software that attempts to "shape" packets ignores an upstream-downloads or a downstream-uploads ability to overwhelm the available packet buffers on the high speed side of the link when communicating to the low speed side of the link.
So you can start streaming a video down, and then start an FTP transfer, and your upstream router at the ISP is going to have its buffers full of untransmitted FTP download packets worth of data, instead of your streaming video data, and it doesn't matter how bitchy you are about letting those upstream FTP packets through your router on your downstream side of the link, it's not going to matter to the video stream, since all of the upstream router buffers that you want used for your video are already full of FTP data that you don't want to receive yet.
The correct thing to do is to have your border router lie about available TCP window size to the router on the other end, so that all intermediate routers between that router and the system transmitting the FTP packets in the first place also lie about how full the window is, and the intermediate routers don't end up with full input packet buffers with nowhere to send them in the first place.
Does your border router do this? No? Then your QoS software and AltQ and other "packet shaping" software is shit. Your upstream routers high speed input buffers are going to end up packed full of packets you want less, and you will be receiver live-locked and the packets that you *do* want won't get through to you because of that.
You can either believe this, or you can get a shitty router and not get the performance you expect as the QoS software fails to work.
Then you can read the Jeffrey Mogul paper from DEC Western Research Labs from 1997 here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v...
BTW: I also highly recommend the Peter Druschel/Guarav Banga paper from Rice University in 1996 on Lazy Receiver Processing, since most servers are still screwed by data buss bandwidth when it comes to getting more packets than they can deal with, either as a DOS technique against the server, or because they are simply overloaded. Most ethernet firmware is also shit unless it's been written to not transfer data unless you tell it it's OK, separately from the actual interrupt acknowledgement. If you're interested, that paper's here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v... and I expect that we will be discussing that problem in 2024 when someone decides it's actually a problem for them.
Nothing you say says that Mr Saverin has gotten away from his US tax liability. Only by renouncing citizenship can one end the tax liability, and even that continues for some years (10 I think) after the renouncement.
He did renounce it. And he renounced it before the IPO. So his liability is for what he owed before he renounced it, which is
How many homeless volunteers took off with the camera and sold it to buy booze?
I think there's a more important question... how many mountain lions, gazelles, and other animals took off with the Harmless Radio Collars(tm) that Marlon Perkins had Jim Fowler attach to them while filming Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom"?
"My name is Linux Torvalds... and I pronounce him 'Linus'...".
Once thing they should look at is a city within a single mega-structure.
Why should they build an Arcology, when there are already two in progress:
Masdar City in Abu Dhabi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Arcosanti North of Phoenix Arizona: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Yes, it is quite large, in relative terms. The city of Pittsburgh is only about 30,000 people, meaning the % of the population in those 2 centers alone accounts for roughly 1% of the population.
Off by a factor of over 10; as of 2012: population of 306,211. That's 0.08%, not 1%.
If those San Francisco residents who are "entrenched" had to pay for their taxes like new residents do, they would be paying 1.25% per year property taxes on the current value rather than the basis of when they bought the property.
That's a great reason to do what rental property owners do, and own a company that owns the property, instead of owning it themselves. Then if they ever want to sell it, they can sell if for a heck of a lot more money by selling the company, rather than selling the property, so the taxes don't go up any more than if you'd bought under prop 13 and never sold.
That's the McDonald's model (McDonald's happily admits to being a real estate company that happens to sell burgers and rents out properties their franchisees). It's also the same model that the Kaiser Family Trust uses.
The only way to fix the Bay Area housing crisis is to build more fucking housing.
One of the things that isn't talked about is the amount of empty office and residential apartments in the Bay Area. It's actually worth more money to price them out of the range that people are willing to pay, and then take the "market rent you are not getting", and use it as a tax write-off. It's a common practice in China (Google "ghost cities"), and it's becoming more common in the Bay Area.
If you want to take a little trip on 101 between SF and SJ, it's easy to see a lot of empty buildings, and it's easy to see some of the mega-complexes that are going in in Redwood City and elsewhere, which are probably going to remain mostly empty as a tax write-off to balance out other income.
Your argument is silly because it completely discounts cost of living.
I live in Boston, and rent is just one portion of your expenditure. Taxes, childcare, private schools, parking, and even your average restaurant bill are all significantly higher. This winter, I paid more to shovel after one storm in Boston than my friends did to have someone shovel all winter in Cleveland.
My salary would get me a middle class living in Boston or SFO, a lower middle class living in NYC, and an affluent upper middle class living in most of the midwest.
Blanket statements that anything about X makes you rich (or super rich) is plain ridiculous. Heck, I'm in NYC as I'm typing this and I'm pretty sure you'd get a shoebox for $1500.
Real Programmers don't eat quiche. They eat Twinkies and Szechwan food.
