Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:I want a passenger car like that (Score 1) 185

Interesting. Now, make an ICE version. I live rural and charging stations are very few and far between. The nearest is 20 miles away, but several gas stations are available within 3-5 miles.

I don't think an ICE version would be legal. You can't really hit the emissions targets without electronic engine controls.

As for charging, your house is the charging station. You might have to run an outlet and plug in an EV charger. If you've got a welder you've almost certainly already got a NEMA 14-50 or similar that will work. And if you don't have a welder, you should fix that ASAP! Everyone who lives in the sticks should have a welder and know how to use it.

Comment Re:Capitalism wins again. (Score 1) 185

Yes, but that is the end state of capitalism. Capitalism rewards business that can build competitive advantage, which includes barriers to entry for competitors. You may start out with a "free market" but most of the participants in that free market are trying as hard as they can to slant it towards themselves - to make it less free- and those that don't tend to lose out to those that do.

They try, and often they succeed for a while, but they eventually get disrupted by market changes. The most important thing is to be vigilant for regulatory capture. It's when businesses can enlist the power of the state in maintaining their moats that they can stay on top indefinitely.

Comment Re:Capitalism wins again. (Score 1) 185

Wrong. The dollar is for your time and labor. No "capital" involved.

And for your knowledge.

This is the enormous oversight in the Labor Theory of Value. Knowledge is actually more significant than labor. Without the requisite knowledge, labor and capital produces nothing useful. With it, the labor and capital generate something people want. With more of it, less labor and less capital produce more output, or better output.

It's understandable that Marx didn't notice the value of knowledge. He was mostly thinking about agricultural production, implemented with practices that hadn't changed significantly in generations, maybe centuries. The knowledge was already so well-dispersed among the relevant population that it was easy to just assume it as background knowledge, like knowing how to walk and talk. And it changed so slowly it was easy to miss that increases in knowledge enabled increases in production.

But ignoring the contribution of knowledge leads to failing to recognize the power of innovation. That leads to all sorts of foolishness, including a failure to recognize the power of competition and other forces that motivate innovation. The history of countries who tried to follow Marx's ideas are replete with examples of incredibly-foolish decisions by central planners who failed to understand the value of knowledge, both direct and embodied.

Another sort of knowledge people tend to ignore is managerial knowledge, at all levels of the chain and most especially in the allocation of capital (the labor involved in capital allocation is also often ignored). All those irritating financiers who seem like pure parasites are in fact doing critically-important knowledge work (and it is work) by making capital available to the enterprises who can make effective use of it, and withdrawing it from less effective enterprises.

Perhaps the biggest form of knowledge that is ignored is the knowledge encapsulated in prices, which is collectively generated and refined by countless people in every supply chain. Encoded in prices is deep knowledge of every stage of the supply chain and the value that it represents for one usage as compared to another. This is the single biggest source of foolish behavior by central planners. There is simply no way for them to discover the deep, detailed knowledge encoded into prices, and as a result they make terrible choices about how to allocate capital, labor and human knowledge. Markets also don't do it perfectly (we're human), but they do it far, far better. This is the single most important reason why capitalist economies massively outperform centrally-planned ones, though the other reasons also contribute.

Comment Re:Capitalism wins again. (Score 1) 185

Ahem....back to tractors one can own and self repair made simply and just works... If they would only do this with CARS and JEEPS again.....simple, mechanical

I think that's impossible for internal combustion engines. They can't meet the emission control standards without intricate computer engine controls.

However... it should be very possible for EVs. You'll still need a little computerized control of the charging subsystem, but that's it -- and that could be an easily-replaceable module. The rest could be incredibly simple. No more complicated than an electric golf cart, just scaled up.

Comment Re:Remotely downloaded code (Score 4, Informative) 16

What, exactly, is the point or purpose of including code in your program that is downloaded from a third-party website every time you execute the program?

No, npm is literally the opposite of that.

If you want to include a function or subroutine or library in your program, why wouldn't you just download it and use that?

I run Drupal and it uses composer, which does basically the same thing. But then I want some javascript libraries that you can't get through composer repos itself, you need to get them from npm. So every time there's one of these npm exploit stories I say oh shit, some more shit I need to read. Luckily I'm only pulling in literally two packages from there. But I don't need to do this, I only do it specifically for the purpose of not having my site refer to some other site for those javascript libraries. That way, someone else changing their library doesn't automatically screw up my site, or more plausibly since I am not running any javascript on the server side, start back dooring other people who visit there. So npm is exactly the kind of thing you think people should be using, except with less oversight which is why we keep hearing about loads of compromised packages.

Comment Re:still bummed about SG-U (Score 1) 92

Disagree on this. That's like saying only shows that trek through the stars should be called Star Trek - and yet the best Star Trek series ever made was Deep Space Nine.

Yeah, they had B5 to crib from.

The Stargate is just part of the premise of the followup shows, not a required defining characteristic of them

If you're putting it in the title, yes it is.

Comment Re:8-1 decision (Score 2) 60

Dear friend,

We make certain rules so that we can live in the same nation together. For example, we must to a reasonable extent unify our motor vehicle requirements so that you can reasonably travel to other states without onerous additional inspections and harassment. Alas, with rights come responsibilities.

Signed,
Srsly

Comment Re:8-1 decision (Score 2) 60

It's clearly unconstitutional (like 90% of what the Federal government does) so obviously only Thomas would dissent.

The poster is a troll, and I completely disagree with the framing that Thomas is some devout defender of the Constitution, but there is actually a point here. The point was highlighted by Justice Sotomayor in the oral arguments for Trump v Slaughter.

The TL;DR is that we've been pretty egregiously violating the Constitution's separation of powers for a century, and everyone has just quietly agreed to look away. We've been looking away for very good reasons, and what we really *ought* to do is amend the Constitution, because this is an area where the Constitution's 18th-century design does not work for the 20th (or 21st) century reality.

The longer explanation:

The Constitution sets up a strict separation of powers. Only the legislature can make laws. Only the executive has the wherewithal to enforce the laws. Only the judiciary can interpret the laws, and their constitutionality. Each serves as a check on the others. The president can veto legislation. The legislature can refuse to fund the executive's initiatives. The judiciary can invalidate laws and issue orders to the executive... but the judges have to be nominated by the president and approved by the Senate. It's solid partitioning of power, designed to prevent the monarchical abuses the founders were familiar with, abuses that occur when one man (or woman, or small group) has the power to make the laws, enforce the laws and interpret the laws.

Very nice. But it doesn't work in the modern world.

The reason is that the US is much, much bigger and the world is vastly more complicated than it was in the 18th century. Regulations need to have a level of detail and sophistication that just isn't feasible for generalist legislators, and we don't want to leave the drafting of regulations to lobbyists. What we need is government experts in focused areas (fisheries, energy, mineral policy, telecommunications, etc.) whose full-time job is understanding the minutiae. Then lawmakers can write laws providing broad guidelines for the experts, who study the issues, write the regulations, subject them to rounds of public review and then enact them.

On the judicial side, the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, remain the final line for adjudication, but they're designed to grind very finely, which means they grind very slowly, and at great cost, especially since judges are also generalists so the litigants need to educate them on the detailed issues. To make enforcement of the detailed regulations practicable, we also need, effectively, specialist judges. The way we've handled that is by authorizing the same federal agencies who make the regulations to adjudicate their application.

Oops. Does this sound like we've lumped lawmaking, law enforcement and adjudication all together inside the federal agencies (in the executive branch), in clear violation of both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution, directly defeating the founders' work in dividing them up, re-enabling tyranny?

The letter, definitely. The spirit... not exactly. The other thing we did was to divide those powers up not by category (rulemaking, enforcement, judging) but by subject matter. So while each agency holds great power over its little fiefdom, that power is limited in the aggregate because the potential fisheries tyrant is completely separate from the potential telecoms tyrant. This limits the total power of each and prevents them from getting so big they can't be slapped down.

Unless it doesn't.

This scheme only works if those agencies are independent within the executive branch. And they cannot be independent if the president is free to fire anyone in the executive branch at will, which is what Slaughter is all about. If the president can fire anyone, then the whole of the executive is subject to his will, which means all of those subject-matter-isolated threads of power get gathered up into a single pair of hands.

And if that happens, we're back to monarchy. An elected monarch, perhaps. And possibly with a limited term, and with a few gross checks on power, slow and uncertain in application. But we have a single person with the power to control nearly all of the federal government's power to make, enforce and adjudicate the law, relegating the formal legislative and judicial bodies to backstop positions, generally unable to act fast enough to prevent tyrannical abuses.

So... what we ought to have done is to have amended the constitution to bake the independence of the executive branch agencies into the system. Or, we ought to have created parallel legislative and judicial sub-branches so that each area had its major functions isolated within the Constitutional framework.

This wouldn't have been difficult in the case of the judiciary, though we'd probably have had to create a different hiring process for the thousands of low-level adjudicators required -- going through presidential appointment and Senate confirmation for all of them would be impractical. But on the legislative side, we'd have needed a Constitutional amendment to enable the massive numerical expansion of the legislature necessary for all of the expert rulemaking roles, and those people would also need an entirely different hiring process. Voting on all of them would be impractical.

But fixing the problem correctly in either of those ways was hard, while just ignoring the issue was easy. And ignoring it worked fine for a while. We saw the first potential issues with Nixon, and ever since Nixon almost every succeeding occupant of the White House has chipped away at agency independence. Until Trump 2.0 when we have a president who has smashed a battering ram through all of the norms that maintained it, and is trying to get judicial blessing (the Slaughter case).

If you think the presidential immunity ruling was bad, that's nothing compared to what will be unleashed if SCOTUS finds fully in Trump's favor in Slaughter. We'll have a king with the power to (among many, many other things) unilaterally direct the imposition and enforcement of regulations that impose hundreds of millions of dollars in fines on telecoms companies. In this case, for what I think is a good reason. But whether it's a good reason won't matter if the president wants to do something for a bad reason, he'll have the power.

Particularly dangerous is the combination of:

1. The immunity ruling, plus
2. Absolute authority over the executive branch, plus
3. The unlimited pardon power.

The president can order anything at all done, federal employees will have to do it or be fired, and if it's a crime (a) the president is immune and (b) he can pardon everyone who does his dirty work.

I think the final backstop of impeachment and conviction by the legislative houses is likely to remain in that case as the only real limitation on presidential power. For the conservatives who think this is a good thing, they should think really hard about what a president AOC who decides to fully use the power of the Unitary Executive might do.

Comment Re:Hope someone else picks it up ! (Score 0) 92

They are sitting on it and not using it. They would be happy to take in licensing money instead.

Not necessarily true. They might think they can make more with it in the future, or they might just want to stop a competitor from having a success when they do not at all need the money. You are thinking like a poor.

Comment Re:Yeah. Just like James Bond or Star Trek (Score 1) 92

I'd say the original series is the weakest of all of them... but this is understandable, because they were finding the formula. They didn't really hit their stride until a couple seasons in there either, but there was a lot more to like sooner than SGU. The state of the art was lesser at the time as well, so that made it more appealing, because the production values were really very high. It might not seem like it if you compare S1 of SG1 to S1 of SGA, but you just have to remember that time passed there.

If you watched it in period and were fresh off a high of watching the movie, it was a lot more appealing.

Slashdot Top Deals

Thus spake the master programmer: "Time for you to leave." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

Working...