Fair enough, but how do you say "We're going to get the economy back on track, and then we'll clean up our act" and prevent anyone from changing course back to business as usual?

We don't have to take artificial action because a healthy economy increases demand for energy (here and in the third world), driving up energy prices and making alternate energy sources cost-competitive (a partial goal of cap-and-trade legislation).

In any case, I hope we can all agree that hurting the economy without actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions doesn't help anyone.

On the contrary. Good CS programs don't - and should not - cover things like, for example, use of a debugger. Instead, you are (or should be) given mentally challenging assignments - learning, on your own, how to use a debugger, is (your) part of completing that assignment.

It is entirely appropriate to document such things as part of an undergraduate CS course. It's also practical: by providing simple instructions ("this is a Makefile; this is how you read a man page") an instructor minimizes the time a student spends on topics not directly related to the course.

I wish my BS in CS program had included a Software Engineering survey course. In retrospect that would have been very beneficial.

What's your point?

That providing services to the people is just an excuse. Government actually exists because people crave power over others, not because civilization needs fire departments and a postal service. If there wasn't a government, someone with military might would impose it.

I'd like to see anyone who believes that "the sole purpose of government is politics" try to do without police, fire departments, an educated population, the common defense, lifesaving NIH research, the Internet itself, roads, and clean water.

Or bribery, graft, patronage, embezzlement, nepotism, cronyism and kickbacks. Clearly government is about much more than simple politics.

I am not sure what the substance of his report would be - economic impact?

The article said it listed recent research papers whose findings contradicted the draft EPA report he was reviewing. So in other words, it collected and summarized information.

This guy sounds like a holdover from individuals hired by the previous administration to refute the rest of the scientific community.

If by "the previous administration" you mean the Nixon Administration then you are correct.

What is the state to do?

Minimize the impact of fluctuations in revenue by minimizing government services and expenditures.

Solve the problem of bureaucracy ("the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy") and apply the fix to every state and local government.

The state should be fiscally prudent so that it is able to borrow money to make it through temporary tough times. Then, since it is fiscally prudent, it will be able to pay that debt off during good times.

Obviously no state government is going to do those things, but that's a better arrangement than what we have now (spending higher than revenues all the time.)

Other countries have done what we are proposing, in fact the rest of the developed world with the exception of China have done it.

On the contrary: other countries have passed cap and trade legislation endorsed by environmentalists. This legislation has been watered down so much that environmentalists now oppose it.

IMO universities should be teaching core principles and methods, not attempting to impart up-to-date job skills.

I used to agree, but I changed my mind. In addition to having learned core principles and methods, graduates from universities should be able to support themselves immediately after graduation. That means that they should be able to bring enough value to an organization (possibly one they form themselves) to justify their employment, to provide themselves with food, shelter and the other essentials of life. University is not Trade School: University is a superset of Trade School.

Granted, most of those "job skills" should be learned before a student enters the university: every high school graduate should be able to make a budget, provide themselves with food and shelter, tie their own shoes without help and so on. Obviously we're far from that.

On the specific topic of this story: some scientists need to know Fortran to do their jobs. It may well be good to teach some other language first, or to require a Programming Languages course in every undergraduate science program, but it's essential for undergraduates to learn the programming language(s) that dominate(s) their field.

More cute wishful thinking. See: health care. Socialized medicine provides better care for less money. Which is of course not to say that that government is always better than private enterprise, it's to say that believing that one is invariably superior to the other is just drinking a different flavor of Kool Aid.

Socialized medicine is a poor counterexample because people disagree about what constitutes "better care"[0], illustrating an important point about rule by "experts": central planners seldom know my needs as well as I do. Decentralized decision-making[1] limits the individual[2] and collective[3] impact of bad decisions, and as a bonus increases personal freedom[4] as well.

Private enterprises are just as subject as governments to the inefficiencies of separating decisions from consequences. So are families.

[0] some prefer to provide a minimal level of care to everyone; some prefer to provide a high level of care to a few; some prefer to maximize the total amount of care provided regardless of distribution; some prefer to maximize individual choice; some prefer to maximize life span; some prefer to maximize quality of life . . . In the United States, socialized medicine (Medicare and Medicaid) has failed by any of those metrics.

[1] a.k.a. a free market

[2] individual: the most my bad decisions can cost me is all I have. A government's bad decisions can lose more than we all have together.

[3] collective: when the decision-makers feel the effects directly, the quality of decision improves; this reduces the total number of bad decisions, and thus the collective impact of bad decisions.

[4] freedom: central planners need a justice system to force people to comply with their decisions. In a decentralized decision-making system people make their own decisions.

Markets are the worst way to distribute goods, except for all the others that have been tried.

As a technocrat, rule by technocrat appeals to me, but it consistently produces worse outcomes.

Going from Windows to Windows + MacOS grows the possible market by 6-7%. Going from Windows + MacOS to Windows + MacOS + Fedora + Debian grows by... maybe 1% at what kind of cost increase?

At a minimal cost increase, because your program is well-designed. Your program is well-designed, right?

In the context of the story, the decision to develop a cross-platform application has already been made. We're discussing how hard that is given the variety of Linux distributions. As someone else pointed out, it's easier than I thought.

In the context of the story, the issue at hand is that Google is being pressured by "the Linux community" to develop a version of their browser "for Linux". If your Debian desktop is different than my Fedora desktop, then we can't both run Chrome. Either Google targets Fedora, or Debian, or OpenBSD, or, or or...

If the code base is already cross-platform, then the idiosyncrasies of different Linux distributions are minor; making it run on Debian and Fedora is much easier than making it run on Windows and MacOS. A variety of fine cross platform toolkits and languages exist. Yes, when distributing binaries one must target not only a specific distribution, but a specific release and a specific CPU architecture as well. The easy way out is to not do just that: if you release source packages for Debian and Fedora (whose package managers include automatic dependency resolution), the eager beavers behind other distributions will do the rest of the heavy lifting for you. Or at least, they will for Google.

There is nothing inherent in the concept of government that makes it unable to achieve the same efficiency as private industry.

Some aspects of government make it less likely to achieve the same efficiency as a private organization. It is more difficult for government to fail/fall than it is for a private corporation. It is easier for decisions to be separated from consequences within the government than within a private corporation. In general people can't opt out of government as easily as they can opt out of purchasing a product from a corporation. The more power an entity has, the bigger the impact of its mistakes.