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Really putin should just abandon Ukraine altogether, yes it will probably result in ukraine doing some ethnic cleansing and a lot of unpleasantness but he has done worse.

He can't. Revolution in Ukraine happened on anti-corruption ground and put his rule to serious danger. So everything was done to destabilize Ukraine, to show failure of anti-corruption revolution to Russian people. Ukrainian success will destroy current ruling party and opposition will win in Russia. And he can't afford that, that means death or Haague for him and loss of freedom and money for all his high-ranked friends.

Back in my FoxPro days I cranked out smallish biz apps like lightning with 1/4 the code I use now. The multi-layered client-server and then the HTML/CSS/JS/foo++/SQL stack gummed up that and turned CRUD into a mini bureaucracy.

Oracle APEX allows me to do that right now. It's very useful to churn out small and urgent biz apps quick and deploy them immediately without installing anything on client's computers. Very easy to use, very fast to deploy.

Unfortunately, there is no opensource project like APEX :(

First off, hybrids are NOT EVs. They do not deserve a subsidy since they are going to cost America more money in our electricity.

Electricity is 4-5 times cheaper than gasoline. That's not a problem. The problem with pure EVs is range anxiety and nothing is going to change for a long time (unless somebody invents insanely better batteries).

But there is no need for such batteries -- you can use today PHEV (*PLUG-IN* hybrid) to charge at night and commute on battery, launching gasoline engine only if you need more range than usual (most people need that a few times per year). It looks like manufacturers will figure it out soon and offer PHEVs with cheap and small "range extender" gasoline engines, good only for 30k miles or so. And due to cheap "extender" engine they'll finally match the price of regular cars...

It's wrong to consider prisoner's success alone. If we have two pairs of prisoners and in first pair prisoners did not cooperate and in second pair they did then the second pair of prisoners gets huge advantage: later they can overpower single prisoner from first pair. Thus prisoner PAIRS are going to compete, if we test enough prisoners. After many iterations only cooperative prisoners are going to remain...

Actually we see this in the history: non-cooperative societies, built on violence and slavery gave way to much better societies, despite single people stil being egoistic.

Consequently, a rational person would choose the longest mortgage period possible because they could artificially create ANY shorter mortgage period option through prepayments.

Not always. You have to consider not only monthly payment alone, but interest rate, property price and length of mortgage as well. Extending mortgage length beyond certain limit makes no sense, because it won't reduce monthly payment any more. In previous messages I gave you an example where extra 30 years brought only 1/4 reduction of monthly payment. Worse, total money paid are almost doubled because of extra interest EVEN if you spend that 1/4 reduction to pay off early. Just take any decent mortgage calculator or do some math in spreadsheet and you'll see, monthly payment vs mortgage length is not linear!

It happens because longer monthly payment is going to contain more interest during early years (look at annuity formula). Mortgage is useful within certain limits only, too short and too long make no sense at all.

Assuming income is the same in both situations, if I am not earning higher than 3% on my investments, then why am I not paying off my mortgage with my surplus monthly net cashflow (which is higher in the second scenario)?

Ok, let's do the math again: $500k house, 3%, 60 years, $1.5k monthly payment. Thus I have suprlus $500 per month to pay off the debt. Well, now I have to pay $390k of interest during 52 years. STILL much worse than paying $260 of interest during 30 years, while paying the SAME $2k per months.

See? It makes little sense to extend mortgage more than 30 years in general. Of couse, it depends on %%: with 0.5% interest it makes more sense to take 60 years mortgage: $800 monthly payment (60 years) vs $1500 monthly payment (30 years), that's much better. Now if you pay off $700 every month, your mortgage will end after 38 years and you will pay $44k of interest (compared with $38k of 30 years mortgage), but this difference is negligible.

On other hand... who's going to hand out mortgage at 0.5% for 60 years? Much below inflation?

Most mortgages are ~30years. If you double the time period people can work without having to worry about a mortgage, you definitely have improved their financial situation (assuming some level of rational financial decisions).

Longer mortgage is not going to change the situation, at least not much. Let's say I can pay $2k/month, then I can take 30 years mortgage with 3% interest rate to buy $500k house. Then I'll have to pay $260k of interest to the bank during these 30 years.

Now suddenly I can live much longer -- I can take 60 years mortgage! Wow! Let's recalculate... the same house, 60 years, 3%... Huh? Monthly payment is now $1.5k, that's only 1/4 less than 30yrs mortgage, but now I have to pay $600k of interest for the same $500k house during these 60 years!

I can usually tell who wrote the code in the office by whether or not they put a space after their ifs: if(i == 0) vs if (i == 0); where they put their brackets, whether or not they replace their tabs with spaces, how they deal with bools: if (!var) vs if (var == false) and several other telling signs. There are so many combinations of variations no two programmers in the office (about 12 of us) have the same style.

Can you do the same after indent -kr?..

Use something like Nikola or Pelican with [favourite python template system here] to hit the sweet spot between hand-coding/frameworking and CMS. You can adjust any part of the look, feel and templating easily and you can enable customers to have a very easy/cheap way to get the site up, running and maintainable.

The trouble is, these systems provide very few themes and customers want nice and bright looking themes, they want ease of gallery management, etc. I set up CMSMS or Drupal with "pretty urls" feature, running on hidden site protected with .htaccess password. User changes everything on "hidden" site, clicks "publish" and my simple cgi script runs httrack and downloads HTML-only version of the site into its DocumentRoot. Thus they have both security of plain HTML site and features of full-blown CMS.

I had to switch from CMSMS to Drupal lately because it has much more and better themes than CMSMS.

Of couse, this does not work for dynamic content like comments and such, but it's possible to steer users towards Disqus and keep your own site HTML-only.

Hell, it seemed to require a new law...

May be, but that's not the point. Remember, we were talking about *technology* advances and not about politics? Today we have technical ability to "teleport" more than 50% of population instead of communting. No matter what economics and politics dictate today, this option does exist (and slowly eats real presence jobs).

And that's a lot compared with 19th and early 20th century...

Lastly, real Russians will not post on Slashdot.

I do, sometimes.

Why? Because there is no biological reason for a human to live for 120 years. Most women becomes infertile when they are around 40 old. So anything beyond 60 is really unnecessary in a biological sense - then you have had all the children you should have and helped them grown up.

You ignore the fact that people live in families. Thus grandchildren have much better survivial chances when grandmother provides care for them and teaches them while still young and much healthier mother gives more births and performs heavy house work. If older women had their own kids then they would not love grandkids as much as they do. That's why humans developed menopause.

l propagation speed in copper wire is 0.70c, same as it has been since Edison had his "A-Ha!" moment.

Yes, but at that time they had no IP packets, no video transmission, nothing. It's like saying that everything was invented by Carnot in 1824 and nothing has changed ever since.

I think GP was talking about physical commuting, not telepresence.

Well, if it looks like a job, brings real money like a real job and I'm able to do it remotely on other side of the Earth then hell, what's the difference between physical presence and telecommuting?

crop yields don't increase with more information at hand

Nonsense. Crops yield more when agricultural information is applied. Crops yield much, much more when genetics information is applied...

Travel times aren't reduced since several decades, and where they are indeed reduced, it's far away from what happened in the 19th and early 20th century.

Travel time is close to 200 ms as packets travel around the world from me to US. Thus, my travel time to US is close to the speed of light in many cases (not all, but many), that's a lot faster then what became available in early 20th century (and much, much more comfortable).

From a productivity point of view, the information revolution is a disappointment. Jobs get slashed, but there is no increase in the creation of actual wealth or value.

Uh-oh. There are about 3.6 million of programmers in US, almost all nonexistant 30 years ago. These jobs were certainly slashed during infromation revolution... ooops.

40 cars are not equal to one bus, because not everyone are going from single point A to single point B. 40 cars go from points A1,A2..A40 to points B1,B2..B40, but those unfortunate bus riders have to use several buses and wait for each bus to reach their Bs and get back to their As. And if you have to serve people at least 80% good as cars you much more than one bus. And of couse nobody does that and that's why public transportation sucks. Just an example: Moscow, Russia. Heavy public transportation, a lot of buses, trolleybuses and a huge subway system, often advertised as "transportation solution". Yet I had to buy a car 14 years ago, because commuting from my parent's home to work took about 15 minutes in car and an hour and a half on public transportation -- a bus to subway, subway, change line, subway, bus. A lot of time wasted in hot weather or freezing snow, waiting, waiting, waiting...