From http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1648 :
Simple rate-of-return comparisons such as those Glassman and many other individual-accounts proponents use fail to take into account the costs of continuing to pay for the benefits of current beneficiaries (and the benefits that current workers have accrued) when computing rates of returns for individual accounts, while including these costs in the rate of return computed for Social Security. These costs remain, however, even if Social Security is eliminated for new workers and replaced entirely by individual accounts. As a result, such comparisons are inherently biased. Since the payments to current beneficiaries (and the benefits that current workers have accrued) are not avoided by setting up individual accounts, the returns on individual accounts should not be artificially inflated by excluding the cost of these payments.

In other words, we have the obligation to pay for people who don't have 401ks yet.

Also, 10% earnings is unrealistically optimistic! I just looked up my Vanguard accounts, and over 10 years, 5% is more typical. And, *then*, you have to subtract off inflation. In the real world (vs. one's dreams) one has to settle for about 3% yield over inflation.

So, sorry, parent post. You're all wrong.

Oh, don't exaggerate. Corporations have no soul, but profits are not evil.

You can trust a corporation to do things that people are willing to pay for. Most of those things are useful, though some are ethically dubious.

This is, of course, blatant emotionalism. Taxing someone isn't the same as physically beating them up. But, changing countries is a lot like changing pubs. All of a sudden, there's no one to talk to. People don't move from one country to another very easily.

So, what happens to the tenth man?

Should we say that the tenth man ended his days as a sad drunk, drinking alone at home, because he wouldn't drink with his fellows? Or, is it a triumphal outcome for him? Does he go to another bar and find a better class of friends. Who knows?

Except that it's not a perogative for most private persons to move. You have to fulfil immigration requirements, for one thing. You need to learn a language. You need to drop most of your friends and family. You need to be ready to let your mother die, alone, in a nursing home. All of those things make it impractical for many people to pull up their stakes and go to a different country.

People are not very mobile.

Maybe they left it there because they didn't know how you set up the system? Maybe you think they should take the time to understand your system, and perhaps you don't take the time to understand your users?

Maybe it's wasn't a good idea to set up a system that dumps scan data to a publicly accessible hard disk?

You sound like an IT administrator who has never done research.

* When you run computations that take weeks to complete, reboots *need* to be rare events that are negotiated between IT staff and researchers. Otherwise, productivity goes to zero, and then what's the point of having computers or IT staff?
* When you have terabytes of data, scans can be a major time sink. And false positives? If it eats some of my data by accident, that's big trouble.
* When you've spent a few weeks compiling some odd software and getting 17 libraries to work in concert, the last thing you want is some heavy-handed sysadmin messing with your system. Everyone's big fear is that if you touch the system, you might break it in some subtle way. Subtle problems lead to weeks of debugging or wrong answers, and if you get the wrong answer, what's the point of having computers or IT staff?

The sensible approach is that you have to have a sysadmin who works with the researchers and actually believes that his job is to help do some research. And, sure, the researchers have to make some compromises, too. But research is hard enough to do, even with minimal annoyance from outside.

You need a sysadmin who is willing to say "OK, let's figure out how to minimize the risk" instead of some jobsworth who says "Tough sh**, them's the rules, and I don't much care that the rules were designed for the typical desktop system." In my experience, given good IT staff with the right attitude, most researchers are happy to cooperate. IT staff who cause trouble without providing help will get a different reception.