Red Scares, plural.

1919 - 1921

1947 - 1957

Red scare

That's just the USA. No doubt other countries have similar histories.

Fish have prion diseases -- Mad Cow for fish.

Feeding little fish to big fish may compound the problem, just as feeding "downer" cows (wobbly, unstable, sick cows) to healthy cows may be contributory to Mad Cow.

Shouldn't there be a way to calculate how efficiently a man can be weaponized -- through training, drugs, surgery, cybernetics, social engineering -- so the State can induct the best candidates into service?

(Nickie Haflinger, I'm thinking of you.)

Each day I make a new folder for the day: "02" for March 2, under folder "03" for March, under folder "2013".

Pick an icon for the folder based on my mood, hopes, expectations for the day.

Drag a shortcut to the desktop.

The desktop has daily shortcuts from the previous two or three days. (Also some shortcuts for most-used apps, off to one side. Not too many -- the point is to keep the desktop free of "anything I'm not using right now, or not likely to use soon several times a day".)

Open up yesterday's daily folder. It contains shortcuts to work in progress: files, folders, apps, URLs. Anything I need to do *today* gets dragged from yesterday's folder into today's folder. Anything not so urgent stays in yesterday's folder.

Take a quick look in the folder from two days ago. Anything urgent (not common) gets dragged into today's folder; non-urgent stuff gets dragged to yesterdays' folder, or gets dragged to the "To File" folder.

Folder from two days ago gets removed from the folder. Remaining folder move up the screen to close the gap.

Now get down to actual work. Open today's folder. That's my daily To Do list. Whatever I'm working on Right Now, I drag the corresponding shortcut icon(s) from the daily folder, and drag to the desktop. When I change tasks (which is a lot, I'm restless that way), I drag the "working" icons back to the "daily" folder, and drag out icons for the new current task

All of this props up my mental planning with constant visual reminders. I suppose it sounds like wankery to some, but it seems to help me stay on task.

I'm not thinking of models, advertising, booth babes, or any particular product or industry. I'm talking about the marketing directors, and their assistants, that I have met over the years -- the internal business of me (tech) meeting with Marketing, so everybody can play their part in the corporate passion play.

Why the background image isn't right yet? But the new logo looks good, don't you think? Which features should we try to finish by next summer? And -- gulp -- what are the marketing people are going to tell their bosses about why the current project is late? and so on.

Some of the companies I have worked for are un-sexy, un-glamourous corporate outfits -- yet the marketing people are chronically Beautiful People. I haven't worked for a tractor manufacturer, but I'll bet their marketing director is a looker, and not a weather-beaten farm wife.

Marketing people are beautiful; they are handsome. This seems to be a general truth about the industry.

Beauty sells; Handsome plays. I don't get it, and other people like me don't get it, and we resent it. But there it is.

I suppose this class of people has evolved by cultural selection (or natural selection?), and for good reasons. Marketers must get things done that people like me cannot get done.

I won't say "Hire beautiful." The idea is so repellent, that if I were an eccentric billionaire, I would do is post a job for Director of Marketing with the requirement: "Must be dowdy." (All the lawsuits and hate, interesting way to burn up my fantasy fortune.)

But think about it. Maybe arrange several informational interviews with professional marketing people, or go to a conference of marketers. Step away from your own marketing needs, and make an objective survey of what marketers do as an industry.

Perhaps this Smart City technology can shed light on the Glasgow Effect:

The Glasgow effect refers to the poor health and low life expectancy of Glaswegians compared to the rest of the UK and Europe. The hypothesis among epidemiologists is that poverty alone does not appear to account for the disparity.[1] Equally deprived areas of the UK such as Liverpool and Manchester have higher life expectancies, and the wealthiest ten percent of the Glasgow population have a lower life expectancy than the same group in other cities.[2] Various hypotheses have been proposed to account for the effect, including vitamin D deficiency, cold winters, higher levels of poverty than the figures suggest, high levels of stress, and a culture of alienation and pessimism.

Source

The Wig reasoned that all that obsolete silicon had to be going some where. Where it was going, he learned, was into any number of very poor places struggling along with nascent industrial bases. Nations so benighted that the concept of nation was still taken seriously The Wig punched himself through a couple of African backwaters and felt like a shark cruising a swimming pool thick with caviar. Not that any one of those tasty tiny eggs amounted to much, but you could just open wide and scoop, and it was easy and filling and it added up. The Wig worked the Africans for a week, incidentally bringing about the collapse of at least three governments and causing untold human suffering. At the end of his week, fat with the cream of several million laughably tiny bank accounts, he retired. As he was going out, the locusts were coming in; other people had gotten the African idea.

Count Zero

Thanks for the clarification. The nit I picked was out of scope, given the understanding that defect-free software assumes the integrity of the hardware.

Mod parent up, I'm in complete agreement: "If there's a better way, show us. Come up with a solution. What's stopping you?" And indeed it's not obvious, or we would already have the solution.

I'm not sure I agree that it's possible to develop defect-free software. All hardware is unreliable. Mean time between failure.

Perfect software may be perfect in our minds; but software immediately degrades when implemented as machinery.

Perhaps the original poster is frustrated by the perfection in our minds failing to overcome the limitations of physical reality ... much as we all wish to live forever, even though we know that's not going to happen.

[T]he cost to make high-quality software exceeds the price people would be willing to pay for it.

Amen to that, brother. You have reduced the argument to its most fundamental terms.

Yes, we can do it. But no, we won't pay for it.

After repeated failed attempts to contact the mass-mailing house(s) that send me my recycling each week (in the form of coupons, circulars, etc. in my mailbox), I spoke with a Post Office clerk.

Who told me, in effect: "They pay us too much to stop sending that stuff."

In other words, money is money, and most companies take whatever is there for the taking ... because (they say, oh so reasonably) "We can't afford to *not* take the money".

I don't expect ads when I pay good money to enter a movie theater. Yet there they are -- dammit.

Why do we almost viscerally and intuitively feel that "good stuff" is "up", and "bad stuff" is "down", and how did that sense get propagated from the development of our physical biology to a nearly-universal conceptual and linguistic "understanding"?

Gravity is the reason we perceive down as bad: our tree-dwelling ancestors evolved a sensible fear of falling to their deaths.

We see this in elevator design: the "down" arrow is red, because "down is bad -- the direction that tends to spill blood". The "up" arrow is green or white, because "up is good" (e.g. "up in a tree, where the lion can't get us").

Carl Sagan discusses this theory in The Dragons of Eden.

We think for a living. We build worlds in our head -- like a novelist, except software instead of novels.

Is it any wonder that we are jealous of our genius? We build worlds in our head!