this is true also when you look from management perspective - overoptimised organisation is not capable to adapt to change in environment because it can only do what it does well. This said - not all of optimizing is bad. Companies grow fat and this fat need to be cut somehow from time to time. I have been working motly in big corporations and there is another thing that they do not have - easy way to change. In fact in some situations it was easier to fire the whole dep and hire a new (usually but not always smaller) one to be able to do things differently. What I want to say is that it is not always doom and gloom - sometimes the corporation can reinvent itself again and again. It is difficult and painful but it happens.

This is a nice silly peace of nonsense that got modded up here. You seem to hate the reality you live in that you stopped thinking which is a pity. If you did not you would realize that there are no soldiers that just kill and slaughter but there are groups of soldiers of which some stand on your side and prevent you being slaughtered so they should be better killers than the others or else...

As long as there is a chance some people may attack others you need a military force to prevent being on receiving side of such attack. You may talk nonsense all night long but the fact is that you do not prevent slaughtering by scrapping military service but by trying to civilize and control it. But silly idiots like you do not see this. Yes I am also for peace in the world and all this but in certain situations I prefer to have an army on my side because the other side (whatever that may be) may not have understanding for your peaceful ways. Instead of dismantling the service you try improve it in such a way that it possibly avoids unneeded brutality and does the right thing - that is also more cost effective.

well if you think that that root cause may have been reckless financing 'innovation' combined with lost balance in an economy that was tilted drastically towards finance sector and this 'innovation' was allowed to flourish by (among other reasons) removal of regulation then no. This said I would advise on restrain in attributing anything to a particular government - they can screw things up but usually they just have some influence and not real power to change things either way. Then again you may thing about this way: there are certain things that majority of people in your country considers worthwhile having and which if not paid by taxes or restrained by laws would not exist at all - successful struggle to cut gov will cause people creating those services on lower state or county levels and this making them less effective. What I wanted to say is that small gov as an ideal is just pointless - where are areas where properly organized gov outfit is needed, there are areas where it is not. The problem with simplifications is that as a tool they are useful understand reality better and win elections but they have limits and do not describe the reality beyond those - you must be aware of these limits when you use simplifications (small gov is good) or otherwise you are just a screw up as you think the other side is (whichever that may be).

so you neither you read the article nor you can draw conclusions - must belong to tea party or what? The state (or emperor) taxes people not because it is morally good or bad or it is such a big fun. Taxes are collected for two reasons: keep the state running i.e. have those corner stones of civilization like justice system, police, army, administration needed to govern that etc as well as to spend it on things that whoever has the power thinks is good. This may include the circus or some other policy - i.e. effectively redistributing the wealth. Now the way the wealth is redistributed, who gets it and who pays for it is a matter of applicable laws and decisions that folks in a given country have to come to agreement for - for this a certain amount of social cohesion is needed or appropriate oppression apparatus as well as indoctrination in schools ('free market fixes all' is not much different from 'Kim was the greatest leader' in that it is not really true) - this is in fact redistribution already as in an ideal state police and justice system do not need oppress people into anything so one may argue having institutions like say DEA is just as much about redistribution (of money and power) as in case of public schools etc. Once we understand that we can start thinking about two other things: what we want to support with our taxes including prioritizing of targets etc and how we are going to fund those targets with tax. If one find out that money kept in bank is to be taxed because it benefits the society in which banks operate then so be it and we should only hope that decisions like this are based on merit not on basis of wishful thinking and political indoctrination and they get modified if found not working or being inefficient in that what they do. OC reality is different I know but that is ideal to fight for.

for this reasoning to reflect reality not only the 'rich' would have to invest so that benefit the country they get a tax cut in which does not seem the case - they invest globally and they invest in a way that is tax optimized. This is of course assuming that comparison of consumption v. investment is done on base of how it merits local economy and local population which is also not true - the actual reason why some say so is probably abduction by aliens because I cannot understand how they come to the conclusions that are either neutral or harmful to them while being also a fantasy.

I also think that GOP still has something to learn - the great teacher knew how to solve the problem of faulty statistics

that is not the way groups of humans live/behave/work and group of developers is a group of humans also when they do not like to see it that way. In any group of humans that do something together there is a leader or a group of leaders (as in diarchy in ancient Greece&Rome etc). The way they are chosen i.e. formally or by accident or it just happened that way as in case of Linux & Mr. Torvalds matters much less than how effective the organisation works with them i.e. it is not only quality of the leader(s) but also quality of teams. In small groups leadership tends to be less distinguished but the 'one sticks out' situation starts to be visible when 3 persons work together. IT may be that leader of a group does not want to be as visible and this works well anyway but if you have a group a communication towards the group usually ends up as directed towards few individuals instead of a whole group. Sometimes a group takes a conscious efforts to be uniform instead of structured but it ends up with some gurus having more say than others.

It is interesting to see how communes and kibutzes worked - majority fell on the idea that all are equal and there are no leaders - this works only if you have highly motivated and befriended people that know what needs be done. In any other case a resulting chaos and supporting laziness make such organisation fail terribly. That is experience I have made over last 30 years of work.

good flame congratulations!

How true. I have one comment though:. you say that "pragmatism > idealism" and that it is then sort of bad. That is not entirely true, neither it matters that much. Pragmatism may mean for instance that because you value your own time and want to avoid waste in the future you actually care for structured, well commented code (whichever way it is done). What I wanted to say is that it is not pragmatism that stands in the way but idiocy. I would even go as far as to say that idealism is bad for developing working but also well structured and documented code because idealists do not like to cope with a reality and this means that instead of taking measures that help produce code that is readable and working they tend to do fancy things that do not put things forward forcing others to cut corners because they had to wait and ended up short on time etc. To say it differently: it is not very pragmatic to say: "code whatever important that it compiles" - you pay the price eventually also when you do not notice (because you have no direct comparison).

I agree and disagree.

I agree because I have no patience for converting pdf shitillion times before I can read it on kindle (yea you can do it 'simply' they say.....) and any such nonsense - I expect things to work w/o need for fiddling with them. Even at work where I often use open source I am appalled by the quality and incompatibility and need to fiddle with each of the tools I use but that is work and they pay me so I do not care - privately I do as you do. For the disagreement: I do not trust the googles and apples to keep my data securely. I have to trust somebody but I do not trust big ones because they save all the titles of pr0n I ever watched on their sites to sell it to somebody who is going to use it against me one day. The private information has always been this way and it is going to stay this way. The exhibitionists, perverts and other brain damaged indihviduals including you may trust them I do not and this is a serious problem if you are forced (yes we are that far) to use certain services. On top of it the majority of the services you get are not exactly what I want even if I pay for them which is a serious nuisance. Now you may say I am (almost) alone but there are plenty of people like me even if majority does not even know better.

You dismiss the right of sizable minority to do as they please because you are just satisfied and to add insult to injury you claim that they have no rights because there are only few of them a claim that you did not even bother to prove. How nice of you. So looking at it from broader perspective - even if I agree with you some my disagreement is on the principle - so I'd say fuck you Sir!

I suppose your statistic can be right especially if you count car bombs as traffic accidents.

this is correct. At my engineering course we had a course on reliability of complex systems - this is pretty fascinating stuff by the way - using the same batch increases the risk in case of systematic failure i.e. something is built in incorrectly and has to fail in certain conditions which if they occur may cause all drives of the same batch to fail the same way thus landing you directly a massive problem instead of smaller one. This can be mitigated too - such systemic failures have also probabilities etc but the simples is to mix the devices from different batches if possible. The question about paranoia is difficult to answer - if your data is so precious you will have also backups as a secondary line of defense (first being your raid) but to have high availability you may want to remove/decrease the need to use backups too so mixing batches even if increases work load may be a good solution not a result of a paranoia. In electrical engineering and I am pretty sure any other type but IT (which somehow avoid being engineering and is science or craft somehow???) reliability calculations are made routinely and used to decrease not only cost of failure but also production. I still remember what they taught us on first hour of the course - how to produce torpedoes cheaply while ensuring that they still reach the target - you have to multiply systems but there is no need for any of them to be durable the way say turbine in an airplane engine must be - they must just work for the amount of time they are used an not much longer - to calculate this quite some knowledge empirical as well es theoretical is needed, and how you go about things that you build once only and you cannot use probes of a batch to determine the probability. Fascinating.

they should be hanged by the balls these criminals of yours. I hope jerking off is also a criminal act and police in the land of the free does something to combat this evil activity.

it is getting usually worse when you criminalize prostitution. To help those involved you can do a lots of other things than destroying lives of otherwise good citizens. I suppose comparing your victimized prostitutes with the lady in question is not really that good either....

Paid sex as long as it is consensual, does not harm anybody and should not interest anybody except parties taken part in it (and possibly IRS). How come you see no difference between that and murder is beyond me. It is frankly quite disturbing.

of course you are right. There is not one single bible even today as the gathering of books that bible is looks differently depending on for which version of Christianity the book was prepared. Even if you take the book catholics use now it is still a compendium that at some point has been accepted as a 'proper' version so that unified book can be promoted and used. This process of unification involved removal of some texts. There have also been different translations. All this means that the book albeit for some holy is just some sort of base for those that consider it a book of truths. IN reality all big religions have this problem that their canon has been changed over time. Some ignore this, some use this fact as a reason to dismiss the whole thing as a valid source of anything and for some it is just a good hint pointing them in the some direction. I guess Einstein was in the 3rd group also when he did not follow the direction as considered the whole book of christianity as a set of rather primitive stories. I guess one thing that we usually miss on this is that majority of humans living so far have been primitive in this respect independently what religion or not they committed themselves to.